U of T Receives $52 Million to Upgrade its Niagara Supercomputer
The funding will see the development of the supercomputer and signifies the academic community’s collective pursuit of computing success at U of T and in Canada.
On October 15, 2024, the Digital Research Alliance of Canada, in cooperation with the Government of Ontario, approved a funding package of 52 million dollars for the University of Toronto (U of T) to upgrade its Niagara supercomputer.
The Niagara supercomputer is run by SciNet, U of T’s dedicated supercomputer facility, whose stated purpose is to assist Canadian researchers with their work using its computational resources.
According to SciNet, the current specs of the Niagara supercomputer consist of 80,640 cores, which can operate parallel jobs of up to 1,240 cores each. The supercomputer also uses 202 GB of RAM, boasts three petabytes of storage space, and has an estimated peak performance of 4 petaflops. These specs allow the Niagara supercomputer to be one of the most powerful supercomputers currently operating in the Canadian research environment.
The upgrades from the funding would substitute Niagara’s core system with a replacement that will roughly triple its computing power. Storage capacity will also increase substantially, with an expected rise of 80 per cent, significantly increasing the supercomputer’s research potential.
Such a great amount of power is necessary to combat the many pressing problems researchers are tackling today. According to Rutwa Engineer, an Assistant Professor of Mathematical and Computational Science at UTM, “everything from AI to climate change… anything that has a large amount of data that needs to be passed in” would require using the supercomputer.
Since its launch on August 15, 2018, SciNet has intended to use the Niagara supercomputer for research applications. According to SciNet Chief Technology Officer Daniel Gruner in a video uploaded by Compute Canada, SciNet built the Niagara supercomputer to facilitate basic research of all kinds, no matter the field. Gruner also mentioned that any researcher could utilize the digital resources in the Niagara supercomputer to conduct their research for free due to the ever-increasing digitization trends within the research world.
Notably, on August 16, 2022, a study detailing changes in the ocean due to the effects of climate change used the Niagara supercomputer to model the data therein. The study found through data from Niagara that the melting of ice due to climate change induced staircase-like structures to form within the ocean environment as the freshwater of the melting ice caps meet the warmer salt water of the ocean, potentially accelerating melting speeds. The study represents how the continued development of the Niagara supercomputer can benefit research in such important fields.
Nowadays, the Niagara supercomputer serves at the forefront of Canadian advanced research computing, and U of T’s upgrades promise to progress the nation’s standing on the global stage. Professor Engineer notes that the Niagara supercomputer is already among the “top 100 globally for [research] supercomputers” and that the upgrades have the potential to further increase the prestige of U of T’s research computing capabilities internationally.
Students can also utilize the supercomputer, especially as the upgrades brought by the funding will grow its capability even more. “It allows [students] to work on their projects, both in an academic manner, a research manner, as well as a professional manner that they could showcase on their resumes,” explains Professor Engineer. However, she cautions that students can use the Niagara supercomputer only for research purposes under supervision.
“There are monitor logs that monitor [student] access, and their supervisor would have access to [them] to make sure that [the supercomputer] is being used in an academic matter and not for anything [unproductive].”
The estimated completion date for the upgrades has yet to be publicly released. However, Professor Engineer estimates them to be finished by around mid-2025.
