2011-2012 Stakeholder Recap Contents Message from the Executive 2 Mission and Vision 7 Year in Review 8 Usage and Storage Graphs 12 Researcher Profiles 16 Staff and Committees 23 Financials 25 Partners 26 Contact Us 27 2 Message from the Executive A Year in Review: Building On Strengths And Supporting New Research Projects With winter at our doorstep and a new year on the horizon, we felt it was an appropriate time to reflect on some of the milestones from 2012 and to acknowledge the individuals, teams, and research community involved in contributing to the success of the organization. We have noted in past Annual Reports how High Performance Computing (HPC) has become more prevalent within various public and private sectors. We’ve seen this driven in part by the fact that data is now constantly being collected by everything from orbiting satellites in space to environmental monitoring devices in the field to smartphones in the palms of our hand. Within the academic world, the possibilities for data collection across nearly every spectrum of research has uncovered new needs, increased demands, and exciting opportunities for HPC in a range of traditional and non- traditional discipline areas. At WestGrid, we see evidence of this growth through each increase in the number of proposals submitted to Compute Canada - Calcul Canada’s annual Resource Allocation call. Looking towards 2013, we will continue to engage new users across all disciplines and work with Compute Canada and the other regional HPC divisions to ensure the national HPC platform meets the evolving needs of our user community. Related to that, some of the final purchases from WestGrid’s portion of the Canada Foundation for Innovation’s National Platforms Fund program were completed last year and celebrated with HPC launch events in British Columbia and Alberta. These systems will support a range of big data projects, in fields ranging from genomics to particle physics to the social sciences, and will act as a valuable resource for Canadian research participation in international research endeavors, such as the ATLAS project. 3 As always, the members of our support teams play a critical role, as their expertise and assistance is critical to ensuring researchers are using the systems efficiently and effectively. This kind of support has helped a number of users make great strides in their research projects. Among those are Hirohisa Tanaka and the Tokai-to-Kamioka (T2K) Canada team (see page 18), who are part of a global experiment involving nearly 500 scientists around the world; Geoffrey Rockwell (see page 21), who is using HPC resources to change the way digital humanities researchers manipulate, analyze, and visualize electronic text; and Brian Menounos (see page 22), whose studies into the sensitive relationships between glaciers and climate change will help us predict future impacts of climatic changes. More examples of how WestGrid is supporting Canadian research can be found on pages 16 - 22 of this report. The services and resources we provide for researchers wouldn’t be possible without the support of key partners in our community. These include our 14 partner institutions; the four provincial Optical Regional Advanced Network (ORAN) partners: MRnet (Manitoba), SRnet (Saskatchewan), Cybera (Alberta) and BCNET (British Columbia); and CANARIE, Canada’s Research and Innovation Network. Our strong working relationship with these partners is what enables us to support groups like the Canadian Advanced Network for Astronomical Research (CANFAR) project, which needed to transfer nearly 300 terabytes of astronomical research data across three provinces. Research data was copied from the National Research Council’s Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics’ (NRC-HIA) Canadian Astronomy Data Centre (CADC) in Victoria, BC, and transferred to WestGrid / Compute Canada storage facilities at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, SK to reduce the risk of a loss of data due to a possible earthquake, or other disaster, in British Columbia. In May 2012, WestGrid collaborated with BCNET and Compute Canada to host HPCS 2012. More than 500 delegates from across Canada attended the three-day event in Vancouver, BC, which featured pre-conference workshops, peer- reviewed paper presentations, and a keynote by John Towns, Principal Investigator and Project Director of XSEDE. This event was an excellent showcase of the innovative and exciting research being supported by HPC in Canada. We look forward to attending HPCS 2013, which will take place on June 2 - 6, 2013 in Ottawa, ON. That brings us to our users. Currently, WestGrid systems support more than 1,000 registered users and 475 project groups. The researcher profiles within this report give but a glimpse into our ever-growing diverse and dynamic user community. To each and every one of those users we say: “Keep asking questions. Keep challenging what’s out there. Keep uncovering new problems and keep pushing our resource capabilities.” Your work is what drives WestGrid, and in turn, we are here to support you and to help you succeed. Lastly, we would like to thank the Canada Foundation for Innovation, WestGrid’s vendor partners - HP, IBM, SGI, Dell, and Appro - and our provincial government funders for their ongoing support. If you have any questions about any of WestGrid’s 2012 activities or the current infrastructure framework, please contact us at [email protected]. WestGrid Executive Committee Nikitas Dimopoulos, University of Victoria Mark Thachuk, University of British Columbia Dugan O’Neil, Simon Fraser University Peter Tieleman (chair), University of Calgary Paul Lu, University of Alberta Ray Spiteri, University of Saskatchewan Byron Southern, University of Manitoba 4 Nikitas Dimopoulos University of Victoria Nikitas Dimopoulos is a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Victoria. His research is in the general area of computer engineering. Dimopoulos is specifically interested in computer architecture, parallel computer systems, neural networks, power aware systems, and the grid. He joined the University of Victoria in 1988 after spending a year at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, USA, and served as Chair of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering between 1998 and 2003 and again between 2005 and 2008. Prior to this, he held academic appointments with Concordia University in Montreal. Dimopoulos is a registered Professional Engineer in British Columbia and Fellow of the Engineering Institute of Canada. He holds the Lansdowne Chair in Computer Engineering. Mark Thachuk University of British Columbia Mark Thachuk is an Associate Professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of British Columbia. He received his PhD from the University of Waterloo. Thachuk’s research in chemistry has led to many publications, resulting in fundamental contributions to the understanding of the theory and computer simulation of the dynamics of gas phase ions. Dugan O’Neil Simon Fraser University Dugan O’Neil is an Associate Professor in the Department of Physics at Simon Fraser University. His research is in particle physics at the energy frontier. He has an MSc from the University of Alberta and a PhD from the University of Victoria. In 2003, O’Neil founded a Canadian consortium on the D0 Experiment, a worldwide collaboration of scientists conducting research on the fundamental nature of matter. His group used WestGrid resources at the University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser University to process hundreds of terabytes of raw data from the experiment. The output was utilized to find the first evidence of single top quark production in 2006, and to observe the process in 2009. His research now focuses on finding new physics using the ATLAS experiment at CERN. He currently serves as Deputy Spokesperson for the ATLAS-Canada collaboration. Peter Tieleman (chair) University of Calgary Peter Tieleman studied physical chemistry at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, where he obtained his PhD under the supervision of Herman Berendsen, one of the pioneers of biomolecular simulation. After a year as a European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) fellow at the University of Oxford in Mark Sansom’s research group, Tieleman joined the University of Calgary. Since 2005, he has been a Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences. He is currently an Alberta Innovates Health Solutions Scientist and Alberta Innovates Technology Futures Strategic Chair in (Bio)Molecular Simulation, working in the areas of biomolecular simulation and computational biology. Among his distinctions are an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship, the Royal Society of Canada’s Rutherford Memorial Medal in Chemistry, and a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) Steacie Memorial Fellowship. 5 Paul Lu University of Alberta Paul Lu is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computing Science at the University of Alberta. His research is in the area of high-performance computing (HPC), including algorithms, bioinformatics, virtual machines and cloud computing. In 2004, Paul’s research group created a pan-Canadian metacomputer across 19 universities and 22 administrative domains, known as the Canadian Internetworked Scientific Supercomputer. He also co-coached the University of Alberta team that won the first annual Cluster Computing Challenge at Supercomputing 2007. In 2010, his Ph.D. student contributed the ivshmem/Nahanni virtual device