Volume 35 Number 19	Edmonton, Canada	May 29, 1998
http://www.ualberta.ca/~publicas/folio

Ron Senda, Jonathan Schaeffer and John Samson

The University of Alberta is flexing its gigabytes.

It has just purchased the most powerful computer in the Canadian academy. More than 100 times faster than a high-end desktop PC, the $2-million Cray Origin 2000 machine will increase research capability here by 15 times its previous level. The supercomputer has 10 gigabytes of memory and more than 100 gigabytes of disk. There are only 45 other universities in the U.S. with as much processing muscle.

"For many of us, it arrived just in the nick of time, because we had a lot of projects we wanted to do and we didn't have the resources to do them," says physics professor Dr. John Samson, who spearheaded the acquisition along with Dr. Jonathan Schaeffer in computing science and Ron Senda in computing and network services.

"People were trying to find machines in the United States and Europe, anywhere they could go. Now they can do it here."

The Cray supercomputer will involve more than 100 researchers in 20 departments, from the hard sciences to business to the fine arts. Samson's own work focuses on space plasma physics, a field requiring heavy computational support.

"We try to model the environment in space, and it requires very large computers. It's somewhat akin to the modeling of the earth's atmosphere."

He said the Cray will be used for a long list of sophisticated simulations. Some of these include imaging of fluid dynamics, reservoirs, ocean currents and flows. In medicine, it will be applied to drug development, breast-cancer diagnosis and uncovering the genetic properties of DNA.

Because the computer is a "parallel" machine, its 40 processors can go to work on a single problem or can operate separately on 40 problems at once. The increased speed will also allow for huge advances in virtual reality, reducing the number of days it takes to render a minute of animation from 37 to one.

While the computer has been up and running since April, the acquisition was officially announced last week at West Edmonton Mall's Fantasyland Hotel. A joint venture between the Universities of Alberta and Calgary, it is funded through a number of sources including the Alberta Intellectual Infrastructure Partnership Program, the Universities of Alberta and Calgary, and a merging of start-up funds for new members of the Faculty of Science.

However, Samson says landing this impressive piece of hardware is only the beginning of a much larger, $20-million plan to remain competitive internationally on the research front.

"Believe it or not this computer is not big enough to do some types of programs we'd like to do on campus. Computing ain't gonna slow down, and if you stand still, you're losing."

"The idea behind the new proposal is to build in an element of renewal, so we can stay current and modern and be very competitive in getting new faculty and doing exciting research ... We were invisible before, and we're visible now, but we want to do more than that."

Among other upgrades, the second phase of the project will expand the computer's multiprocessor and develop digital media laboratories at the Universities of Alberta, Calgary and Lethbridge. After three years, the project aims to provide an unprecedented level of computational support to private-sector, government and university researchers in Alberta.

Samson says the impact of the Multimedia Advanced Computational Infrastructure Project will be huge, affecting even Internet use in the province.

But the question on everyone's mind is, will Dr. Jonathan Schaeffer use the new computer to kick some more international butt in checkers, as he did with his famous Chinook program?

"He's probably not going to do more with checkers," says Samson. "He says it's overkill, since against a machine twenty times slower he'd beat everyone in the world. But he's pushing on in artificial intelligence."

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