Press Releases

UNB And Sun Microsystems Open Global Centre of Excellence

The University of New Brunswick in Fredericton and Sun Microsystems of Canada today, Nov. 19, launched the Sun Centre of Excellence for Interdisciplinary Grid Computing. The new centre, located at UNBF's Advanced Computational Research Laboratory (ACRL), is a focal point for new developments in grid computing at the university. It is also an important resource for innovative academic research and computational work throughout the Atlantic region.

Grid computing, a form of networked computing, brings together the processing power from all the computers in a network to perform computations too complex or data intensive for a single computer. Sun Microsystems has a significant competency in grid computing, consistently delivering cost reduction, performance enhancement and shorter product development cycles for customers in bio-informatics, petrochemical, financial services, electronic design, education and research markets.

Many academic centres have invested in grid computing systems to significantly enhance their research and innovation capabilities. UNBF's computing facilitates are used by the computer science, physical sciences, engineering and social sciences departments for computational modeling, database development and many other research projects.

"Our Sun-powered high performance computing facilities have significantly enhanced the university's research capabilities in humanities, health sciences, computer science and engineering," said Virendra Bhavsar, director of the ACRL and dean of computer science at UNB. "With the opening of the centre, the university will boost the province's advanced research capabilities that, though public-private partnerships, can spur increased economic development in the province."

Sun Microsystems has made significant contributions to high performance computing at UNB, working closely with 140 researchers of the ACRL to develop and enhance the resource. The university's $1.3-million high performance computing system, which runs on Sun's Grid Engine software for the Red Hat Linux platform, consists of a 164-processor cluster using Sun V60x/V65x servers, a 2.8 TB Sun StorEdge Array, Sun StorEdge storage devices, an L8 Tape Library, Sunfire V880, Sun Control Station Software and support from Sun Enterprise Services.

"Sun has always recognized the value of innovation in Canada's academic centres, and the value of the multi-faceted relationships between academic institutions and private sector companies," said Lynne Zucker, director of education and research markets, Sun Microsystems of Canada Inc.

Specific projects for the Centre of Excellence for Interdisciplinary Grid Computing include:

• computational fluid dynamics research by the department of mechanical engineering, in partnership with the Canadian Navy, to study engineering fluid flow applications involving fluid turbulence and underwater vehicles, such as submarines;
• research by the department of mechanical engineering and faculty of computer science into materials processing machines, specifically to integrate the communications between machine operations and remote computations;
• development of new a Computational Fluid Dynamics grid partitioning algorithms sensitive to heterogeneous high performance computing resources and networks. This will involve collaboration between UNB faculties and the private sector;
• development of a relational database tools to support the full-text Canadian poetry database, containing most of the previously published works of 183 poets, covering the 18th to the early 20th century;
• collaborative research with Sun Labs to enhance the contextual search capabilities for the Java search engine.

Sun Microsystems of Canada Inc., a subsidiary of Sun Microsystems, Inc., is headquartered in Markham, Ont. The company, which employs more than 550 people, has offices in Montreal, Ottawa, Calgary, Vancouver and Victoria. Sun products and services are also available through Sun Authorized Independent Sales Organizations and iForce^SM System Providers across Canada. For more information, visit http://ca.sun.com.

For more information on the Sun Centre of Excellence visit www. or contact Virendra Bhavsar, dean of computer science at UNBF and director of the ACRL, at 506-458-7265 or Geoffrey Morgan, MAVERICK for Sun Microsystems of Canada, at 416-640-5525 ext: 228.

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