SciNet Consortium

It has received funding from both the federal and provincial government, Faculties at the University of Toronto, and affiliated hospitals.

SciNet was initially formed in the fall of 2004 following an agreement between the Canadian high-performance computing community to develop a response to the newly created National Platform Fund.

To utilize the cold Canadian climate, the system is notified when external air goes below a certain temperature, at which time the chiller switches over to use the "free-air" cooling available.

A significant research area that will be addressed using the SciNet machines is that of climate change and global warming, which is why creating one of the greenest datacenters in the world was of key importance in this project.

The U of T supercomputer which can perform 300 trillion calculations per second will be used for highly calculation-intensive tasks such as problems involving quantum mechanical physics, weather forecasting, climate research, climate change models, molecular modeling (computing the structures and properties of chemical compounds, biological macromolecules, polymers, and crystals), physical simulations (such as simulation of the Big Bang theory in conjunction with the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in CERN, Geneva which will produce cataclysmic conditions that will mimic the beginning of time, and the U of T supercomputer will examine the particle collisions.

Additional areas of research will be models of greenhouse gas-induced global warming and the effect on Arctic sea ice.