Supercomputer enhances calculations
Imagine three and a half million tunes in your pocket. The Altix 4700 is not going to fit in your pocket, but that gives you an idea of the size of its 14,000-GB hard drive.
The supercomputer, ranked the most powerful shared memory computer in Canada, and 155th in the world, with a unified memory 1,500 times that of a regular desktop PC, has just been installed at the Université de Montréal for use by the Quebec Network for High Performance Computing (RQCHP).
Concordia joined the other four provincial universities in the consortium last year on the initiative of Associate Vice-President Research Truong Vo-Van and Gilles Peslherbe, director of the Centre for Research in Molecular Modelling (CERMM).
The computer deployment is part of the last phase of a CFI-funded initiative, just as the government announced a new $180-million CFI grant with other government and private partners to support multidisciplinary research and high-performance computing for another five years.
Gilles Peslherbe is Concordia’s RQCHP representative and site director. He is excited by the potential of the machine, which is theoretically capable of performing 4.9 teraflops (a teraflop is one trillion operations per second). The machine’s 384 dual-core processors can handle simulations on a scale almost unimaginable a few months ago. For instance, calculations that would have taken a year to perform under normal conditions could be managed in days.
Peslherbe and his colleague Ann English are among the 350 Quebec researchers who will use the computer. They will be able to perform molecular modeling to better understand the interactions between hemoglobin and nitric oxide. A better understanding of how oxygen is supplied to muscle through this interaction may inspire the development of new medications. These interactions are almost impossible to detect experimentally.
Peslherbe is equally enthusiastic about the 256-processor machine with a combined memory of one TB (one million MB) that is expected to arrive at CERMM this fall as part of the CFI initiative.
Peslherbe and his 13 CERMM colleagues, as well as other Quebec researchers, will use the machine to advance their research in computational chemistry and biochemistry, addressing problems relevant to the life sciences, materials science and the environment.