Canada's Big Iron Goes Live

It has taken a year and $50-million to put together, and its brain takes up as much room as a warehouse full of refrigerators.

Today, the monster finally opens its eyes, as the University of Toronto's newest supercomputer – the fastest such machine in Canada – goes online.

There's no shortage of beastly metrics by which this computer's power can be measured: It can perform more than 300 trillion calculations a second, simulate the Earth's climate 100 years into the future in four days and help researchers study cosmic background radiation, a calculation-intensive task that offers a glimpse into what the universe looked like 13 billion years ago.

The guy in charge, Dr Chris Loken, and I go back a loooooooooooooong ways (yes, HPC is far, far too small of a world). We were both at NMSU. Me as an undergrad and Chris as a postdoc. He left around 1996, iirc, and went to another position in Kansas, I think, following the rest of the cosmology team of the NMSU astronomy dept head that got a deanship here. We lost track of each other for a very long time after that until in 2006, I went to the Commodity Cluster Conference in Baltimore. I picked a table at random to sit down and talk to the people there over lunch (a habit at conferences unless I have a preset agenda to work through progects). It turned out that I DID know someone at the table: Chris.

NM has a very far reaching impact on HPC and science in general is seems. Not bad for a low ranking, little populated purple state.

Congratz to Chris et al for getting their monster up and running.