It’s unknown how long it will take the more than $18-million machine known as Niagara to crunch the millions of gigabytes in real-time data streaming to it now from the ocean bottom of the Pacific.

“It’s never been done before,” said Peltier, a globally renowned climate change expert. “It could be days or even a week depending on the spatial resolution we decide to work at.”

Unveiled today, Niagara is a massive network of 60,000 cores – the equivalent of roughly 60,000 powerful desktop computers – that can be tasked to work together simultaneously on a single, humungous problem.

This type of setup, known as a large parallel system, is the only one in Canada and is housed in a secure, non-descript location in Vaughan, Ont. It’s open to all Canadian university researchers and is part of a national network of research computing infrastructure.

Read the full article on the UofT News page .

Author: Jennifer Robinson