It requires its own room, where it can perform 360 trillion calculations in a split second, and can do the work of 30,000 desktop computers without breaking a sweat.
In an effort to bolster Canada's research presence on the international stage, the University of Toronto, its affiliated research hospitals and IBM Corp. have combined forces to build what will be the country's fastest supercomputer - and the largest of its kind outside of the United States.
"It will deliver a dramatic increase in our competitive position in a range of different research areas. It's a very, very important step forward for the country as a whole," Richard Peltier, a physics professor at U of T and one of the project leaders, said yesterday.
More than two years in the making, the academic research-based computer will tackle projects in such areas as medical imaging, climate change predictions, aerospace, astrophysics and chemical physics for the SciNet consortium, which includes the university and its research hospitals.
The supercomputer will be 30 times faster than the peak performance of Canada's current largest research system in Dorval, Que., which is used for the national weather forecast, and it will store 60 times more data than the Library of Congress Web archive.
The supercomputer is a hybrid design containing two systems that can work together or independently. Dr. Peltier said a 14,000-square-foot warehouse has been rented just north of Toronto to hold the mammoth machine, and the main computing system should be fully operational by next summer.
The total complex will have 65 large black boxes, each roughly the size of a large refrigerator.
Dr. Peltier said technicians will lay optical fibre from the facility to a new space being constructed at U of T, which will house about 20 high-tech employees working to assist scientists and engineers at the university.
Why is such a machine necessary?
"Well, the calculations we have to perform are superdemanding," Dr. Peltier said. "We have to actually do very, very large computations in order to get answers to the questions we're asking. In science in general, this is really a new paradigm to doing scientific research and it's been growing enormously over the past three decades really. The demands on the computational equipment just continue to increase."
As a physicist with an interest in climate change predictions, Dr. Peltier researches the impacts of greenhouse-gas-induced global warming. Using the supercomputer will allow him to generate predictions over a 100-year period, about 100 times faster than the machine he currently uses, he said.
Dr. Peltier said the new machine will help the university and its affiliated hospitals become one of the world's best computational research institutions and, in turn, attract researchers from around the world.
Until this point, the lack of proper technological capabilities has "seriously constrained our competitive position," Dr. Peltier said.
"We'll now have machines available in the country which are really competitive with the best in the world, which is a situation we've never been in before."
The supercomputer is part of a national computational research strategy. SciNet is one of seven consortiums across Canada that represent 61 institutions and thousands of university faculty members involved in computationally based research. Dr. Peltier said while other computers will be installed across the country at various universities, none will as powerful as this supercomputer.
Funded by the Canada Foundation for Innovation, the provincial government and the private sector at a cost of about $50-million over five years, the supercomputer is the second most powerful computing system on a university campus. The "Ranger" in Texas is the fastest academic research supercomputer.
Many supercomputers, Dr. Peltier said, are capable of doing a limited number of tasks. "This machine ... that we're putting together will be extremely powerful for a very, very wide range of tasks. It's going to be among the very best installations in the world."
