Supercomputer named after James Wesley (Wes) Graham, a Canadian pioneer in the computing industry, former mathematics professor at the University of Waterloo and father of its world-renown computing program.
photo: Waterloo Region Record
In 1967, the University of Waterloo had the distinction of being home to the most powerful computer in Canada. Known as the IBM 360/75, this mainframe device had 1,024 kilobytes of memory and could perform up to 960 thousand instructions per second.
Fast forward 50 years and Waterloo has that distinction once again. On May 5, 2017, the University of Waterloo, Compute Canada and Compute Ontario unveiled the largest supercomputer at any Canadian university.
Named Graham, the supercomputer can handle more simultaneous computational jobs than any other academic supercomputer in Canada, ultimately generating more research results at one time.
A typical desktop or laptop computer has four central processing units or CPUs. Graham has 33,000 CPUs, weighs 16 tonnes and uses 650 kilowatts of power. With its extraordinary computing power and a storage system of more than 50 petabytes — or 50 million gigabytes — Graham can support researchers who are collecting, analyzing and sharing immense volumes of data.
Graham is the result of an investment worth $17 million from the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) and the Government of Ontario. It is one of four new supercomputing and data centres that are part of a national initiative valued at $75 million that involves CFI, and various provincial and industry partners.
Graham is housed on the ground floor of the Mathematics and Computer Building.
Facts about Graham
- Located at the University of Waterloo, Graham is one of Canada’s newest large-scale computing resources and provides expanded compute, storage and cloud resources for researchers across the country. Graham is one of four new national systems being deployed as part of one of the biggest advanced research computing renewals in Canada’s history. Learn more about this technology renewal at www.computecanada.ca/techrenewal.
- Graham is powerful. With over 1,000 nodes and 33,000 CPU cores, Graham will support more simultaneous computational jobs than any other Canadian academic supercomputer. It provides 2.6 petaFLOPs of peak theoretical computational performance.
- Of the General Purpose Clusters in the new Compute Canada fleet of resources, Graham is the largest in terms of total core count.
- Graham provides more GPU-equipped nodes than any other Canadian academic supercomputer, enabling large data processing to run efficiently. Overall this also helps the system to run with fewer idle cores at any given time, meaning that more jobs will run simultaneously, and ultimately more research results will be generated.
- Graham’s configurations are specially tailored to accommodate and accelerate the kinds of procedures that Canadian innovators are using for their groundbreaking research.
- Graham is built for big data. With its massive 5 petabyte parallel storage system and extraordinary computing power, Graham can support researchers who are collecting, analyzing, or sharing immense volumes of data.
- Graham supports a broad range of projects. Researchers will pursue discovery and innovations in advanced manufacturing, artificial intelligence, political science, chemistry and engineering, among others.
- Graham offers cloud computing. Using OpenStack, Graham’s massive storage and batch high performance computing environment will integrate seamlessly with Arbutus — Compute Canada's cloud system at the University of Victoria — and other systems in the national cloud federation.
- Data intensive science requires a platform optimized for large capacity, high performance data flows. Graham is fully integrated into Compute Canada’s National Data Cyberinfrastructure, which allows for massive data flows at up to 100Gb/s among sites.
- Graham was born out of collaboration. Together, Waterloo (a member of SHARCNET, a multi-university consortium in Ontario), Compute Ontario and Compute Canada built a system that serves over 11,000 Canadian researchers across all academic disciplines.