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SHARCNET2, Quadrics Capability and Capacity solutions


With the investment from the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) and the the Ontario government, in 2005 SHARCNET (Shared Hierarchical Academic Research Computing Network) chose HP to install 4 new systems to their cluster of clusters, augmenting their computing network's capacity from 1,000 to 6,000 processors, nearly half of them using Quadrics' interconnect.

Sharcnet needed to expand its capabilities in order to satisfy the growing demands for HPC in established research areas, including Engineering and Applied Science, Physics and Chemistry, Astrophysics and also to satisfy the demand for HPC by new fields and research groups, such as Bioinformatics and Biocomputation, Financial Mathematics, High Performance Computing Tools, and Computational Social Sciences.

The enhanced capability furthermore provides a test bed for innovative solutions in data storage and visualization over a distributed network.

The cluster expansion will assist SHARCNET in accelerating breakthroughs in such areas as human genomics, the containment of infectious human and animal diseases, improving weather prediction, simulating the collapse and formation of planets, and the development of nano-scale electronic devices.


'The QsNetII interconnect provides exceptional performance for 'tough' applications scaling to many hundreds of processors, it has the lowest latency in its class and provides advanced features, such as remote memory access, that allow us to build a true high performance capability cluster. Our original QsNet systems are still in production and we are very excited about the potential of QsNetII.'
Hugh Couchman, Scientific Director.



Sharcnet2 - Quadrics Systems

Overview of the four Quadrics systems deployed at Sharcnet2.
Click on thumbnail to see larger image.
  • Bull: new QsNetII system of 384 CPUs, this system will be used as an SMP cluster.
  • Requin: new QsNetII system of 1536 CPUs, this system will be used as a Capability cluster.
  • GreatWhite: existing QsNet system of 460 CPUs expands to 756 CPUs with the inclusion of four smaller systems.
  • Coral: existing QsNet system of 64 CPUs, this system will be used as a test benching cluster.
  • Overall Sharcnet Network Courtesy of Sharcnet



    In the Press

    Sharcnet announces expansion
    Sharcnet chooses HP
    Sharcnet swims into the future


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