HPC 2015-16 | Canada


Consolidation of systems yields larger and more capable systems, while distributed support yields better capabilities for researchers to do their work on their own campuses. Compute Canada combines the expertise


of more than 200 technical experts employed by member institutions across Canada. By pooling their collective expertise, Compute Canada is moving towards a model where the most capable personnel from across all its member institutions can work together as national teams. Tis is necessary to run the consolidated systems effectively because they will have a broader mandate and users will have higher service expectations.


Creating a seamless national storage infrastructure As Dugan O’Neil points out, many organisations around the world are facing similar challenges right now. Te growing volume of data that we manage is a challenge. One aspect of this challenge is to describe and manage that data properly. Researchers not only have to be able to find the data they have stored, but they have to describe it well enough so that other researchers can find and use that data. We see our colleagues in the USA, Australia, and Europe working on similar issues and


Science to celebrate in Canada


Accelerating access to genomic information McGill University’s Dr Guillaume Bourque and Sherbrooke University’s Dr Pierre-Etienne Jacques and their team of researchers have created GenAP, a tool that enables Canadian researchers to access and use genomic data more easily, to advance knowledge of human health and disease. Data from human genomes is a rich resource for researchers in many fields of human health, but the size of the datasets can be daunting. Estimates suggest that fast machines for human- genome sequencing will be capable of producing 85 petabytes of data this year worldwide. GenAP, a software platform that, through a simple point-and-click web interface, enables researchers to access genome datasets and send them for processing at Compute Canada’s high-performance computing facilities across Canada, solves that problem. Simply put, the software lets more researchers conduct more


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analysis, which accelerates the new understanding about diseases and their potential treatments.


‘Providing a wide range of researchers and clinicians with access to this data creates a new playing field and strengthens the team that is investigating the genomic factors impacting disease,’ Dr Bourque said at the time of GenAP’s release. ‘GenAP has the potential to accelerate the interpretation of genetic information into knowledge that can be applied in diagnosing, treating and preventing disease.’


A global tool to measure climate change Climate change is affecting countries all over the world and understanding atmospheric composition and its effects on air quality and climate is essential to mitigating the problem. Professor Randall Martin is the director of the Atmospheric Composition Analysis Group at Dalhousie University, and is a research


associate at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. His research focuses on characterising atmospheric composition to inform effective policies surrounding major environmental and public health challenges, ranging from air quality to climate change. He leads a research group at the interface of satellite remote sensing and global modelling, with applications that include population exposure for health studies, top-down constraints on emissions and analysis of processes that affect atmospheric composition. This group’s work has been honoured as Paper of the Year by the leading journal Environmental Health Perspectives.


‘Compute Canada resources are critical for our work,’ Dr Martin says. ‘Our research requires intense calculations and vast data storage to conduct satellite retrievals of atmospheric composition and to simulate the multitude of processes affecting atmospheric composition, both of which are needed to inform


policy development for air quality and climate change.’


Beyond the Milky Way University of Victoria’s Christopher Pritchet heads up the Canadian Advanced Network for Astronomical Research (CANFAR), an operational research portal that facilitates the delivery, processing, storage, analysis, and distribution of large astronomical datasets. An innovative but challenging new feature of the research portal is the operation of services that channel the deluge of telescope data through Canadian networks to the computational grid and data grid infrastructure. Dr Pritchet’s portal is used by many Canadian astronomy projects employing data generated by peer-reviewed allocations of observation time using three of Canada’s telescopes: the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope, the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope and the Herschel Space Observatory, as well as data from other tools, such as the Hubble Space Telescope.


we need to work together on interoperable solutions” Compute Canada is responding to this


challenge by creating a national storage infrastructure, with the goal of deploying almost 60 petabytes of new storage capacity. Seamless access to data resources will facilitate more complex and robust workflows, while making it easier to share data without unnecessary duplication. Tis new storage infrastructure will have the


capacity and features needed for the diverse user base. Features include data isolation for multiple tenants of data resources, object storage access mechanisms, geo-replication and backups of datasets and hierarchical storage management, which will appear to most users as unlimited capacity.


New services, new approaches Compute Canada will also grow its cloud deployment and integrate cloud services,


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