Accelerating the pace of Canadian Research
Research
HPCVL member institutions, Queen's University, Royal Military College and St. Lawrence College in Kingston, Carleton University and the University of Ottawa in Ottawa, Ryerson University and Seneca College in Toronto, and Loyalist College in Belleville. Dedicated to providing researchers at member institutions and researchers at other institutions in Canada with the secure High Performance Computing (HPC) resources they need to conduct innovative research in a broad spectrum of disciplines within the sciences, engineering, medicine, social sciences and the humanities, HPCVL has implemented support programs with the assistance of its partner, Sun Microsystems, and the Government of Ontario.
Excellent examples of the innovative research being conducted using HPCVL resources have been reviewed in the HPCVL newsletter Labnotes which HPCVL has been publishing since 2001. Current and back issues of Labnotes may be found at: www.hpcvl.org/news/newsletters
Some examples of the research areas undertaken with HPCVL resources include but are not limited to:
Computer Aided Molecular Design (CAMD)/Computational Chemistry
CAMD is a well-established HPC field and is crucial to modern pharmaceutical discovery, medicinal chemistry and biotechnology. HPCVL researchers are using HPC to help design new drug molecules. Computational chemistry has traditionally been a large user of HPC. The development of new computational chemistry methodologies that can be applied in many areas such as drug design is a good example of how HPCVL researchers are using HPC.
Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD)
CFD has applications in many areas ranging from aircraft design to drug delivery. In each case, the flow of fluids and particles are modeled to reproduce actual conditions. HPCVL researchers are using HPC to develop and test models that can be used by industry to speed developments and improve design efficiencies.
Polymer Science
Polymers are extremely complex systems to model and without HPC, low level empirical methodologies must be used. HPCVL researchers are using HPC to replace empirical relationships and design polymer materials on the molecular scale.
Applied Parallel Computing
The availability of new devices and increased user demands, particularly for 3-dimensional modeling, results in higher computational burdens and the need for novel techniques and systems to be developed for the effective use of parallel computer systems (HPC systems). HPCVL researchers are utilizing HPC and developing new methodologies and tools in Applied Parallel Computing to address this problem.
Econometrics
An emerging HPC field is econometrics. Areas of econometrics, such as, statistical testing based on bootstrap methods and financial econometrics making use of stock market data need HPC resources. HPCVL researchers are developing new methodologies for testing economic models.
Psychology
Psychology is fast becoming an emerging HPC research area. HPCVL researchers are using HPC to mathematically model the brain and human memory.
Bioinformatics
Bioinformatics is a new interdisciplinary field that lies at the intersection of biology, medicine, mathematics and computer science. It combines aspects from these four fields to gather, sort and analyze large masses of biological information in a meaningful way. HPCVL researchers are utilizing HPC resources to analyze large masses of data and develop new methodologies to help in that process.
The Sudbury Neutrino Observatory
The Sudbury Neurtrino Observatory (SNO) is recording and analyzing data that has provided revolutionary insight into the properties of neurtirnos and the core of the sun. Results reported from this project have been selected by Science magazine as being in the top 10 scientific breakthroughs and as the second most important breakthrough for science in the years 2001 and 2002, respectively.