Computing Resources
SHARCNET
UOIT is a member of SHARCNET (Shared Hierarchical Academic Research Computer Network), a high-performance computing consortium of 14 universities, 2 colleges and a research institute based in South-Central Ontario. A high-speed optical network connects the computing facilities located at each institution. In 2004, SHARCNET was successful in a CFI Innovation Fund competition ($48.3M), which resulted in a significant expansion of the facility. SHARCNET is currently ranked as the 224th top High-Performance Computing facility in the world (June 2009, http://www.top500.org). As part of SHARCNET, UOIT has a development cluster of approximately 32 processors located on-site. This, combined with other local equipment, provides students involved with the M.Sc. in Modelling and Computational Science the ability to work on cutting-edge research.
AccessGrid
AccessGrid is an ensemble of resources including multimedia large-format displays, presentation and interactive environments, and interfaces to Grid middleware and to visualization environments, to support group-to-group interactions across SHARCNET. These facilities facilitate collaboration by faculty and students across SHARCNET. AccessGrid facilities at UOIT were installed as part of the local SHARCNET installation.
Computational Science and Visualization Laboratory
Through the CFI New Opportunities program, a subset of faculty members involved in the Modelling and Computational Science M.Sc. program have established a Computational Science and Visualization Laboratory. The laboratory consists of one SGI Fuel Visual workstation, six all-purpose dual-Opteron 250 IBM A Pro workstations, a central data storage system, and the necessary infrastructure. The SGI workstation is a specialized machine ideal for the visualization of 3D scientific data, while the IBM workstations will be used to run software such as MATLAB, MAPLE, and FEMLAB, which are indispensable tools for preliminary investigation, problem formulation, less intensive visualization, and for the complete analysis of moderately sized problems.
Additional UOIT Computing Facilities
The current computing facilities at UOIT include an 8-node dual Intel Xeon processor Linux Beowulf cluster, and a 4-way Itanium 2 midrange Hewlett-Packard (HP rx-7620) server. Also, many of the faculty have research dedicated machines, including 4 dual AMD Opteron workstations, which are available for graduate student use over the university network. An HP machine is used as a general-purpose server, and for SMP (shared-memory processing) computing. The Beowulf cluster executes distributed-memory multiprocessor programs, mainly MPI (Message Passing Interface)-based. It is used for code development and as a (local) supplement to SHARCNET.
