Mario’s Entangled Bank

The recent announcement of the collaborative effort between University of Toronto’s SciNet Consortium and IBM to build Canada’s most powerful supercomputer (CBC blurb) came in a time when the Canadian supercomputer infrastructure  is in dire straits.

In the latest TOP500 list, released in June 2008, Canada is represented by only two supercomputing systems. A Environment Canada system used for weather forecasts (more here) ranked 249 (starting out at at 54 when it made it’s entry onto the list in 2004). The second system is the University Health Network at University of Toronto making it’s first appearance in the current Top 500 list at rank 395. As a comparison, several emerging and developing economies (as classified by the IMF and UN) has supercomputer infrastructures beating Canada’s both in terms of numbers of systems and their rank, e.g. India has two systems ranked 8 and 107, Russia has four systems ranked 36, 56, 169, 227, and China has three  systems ranked 111, 117, 178. Among the research intensive and advanced world economies, the failing grade of Canada’s supercomputer infrastructure is even more apparent, e.g. 247 (138 ) of the systems on the list are located in the USA, 53 (23) in the UK, 46 (20) in Germany, 34 (10) in France, and 22 (15) in Japan (numbers in brackets indicate the number of systems ranked above the highest ranked Canadian system, full list available here).

Canada has a long history of conducting world class science in scientific disciplines where it is essential to be able to carry out large-scale computer simulations, e.g. astrophysics, aerospace, chemical physics, molecular dynamics, climate change predictions, and medical and biological research. In order for Canada stay on top (i.e. continue with it’s excellence in research and being able to attract the top brains to it’s research institutions) it needs to invest much more in cutting edge supercomputer infrastructure and do a better job at keeping it’s existing infrastructure on the cutting edge.

This is from the “Mario’s Entangled Bank” blog ( http://pineda-krch.com ) of Mario Pineda-Krch, a theoretical biologist at the University of California, Davis.