The Canadian Internetworked Scientific Supercomputer

摘要

On November 4, 2002, a Canada-wide virtual supercomputer gave a chemistry research team the opportunity to do several years worth of computing in a single day. This experiment, called CISS-1 (Canadian Internetworked Scientific Supercomputer), had three research impacts: (1) in partnership with C3.ca, created a new precedent for cooperation among Canadian high-performance computing sites, (2) demonstrated the scalability and capabilities of the Trellis system for wide-area high-performance metacomputing, and (3) produced a new computational chemistry result. Using roughly 1,376 dedicated processors, at 20 facilities, and in 18 administrative domains across the country, approximately 3.5 CPU years of computing were completed. CISS-1 is a prototype for future research projects requiring large-scale computing in Canada. This is the first step towards making CISS a regular event on the Canadian research landscape.