Grant: Alliance Grants

This project will enhance the state of the art for a Canadian-developed high performance computer network in collaboration with Rockport Networks. High performance networks are critical elements of Cloud computing centres and Supercomputers. Rockport's networks take a unique approach to high performance networking by being switchless and highly network path-rich. This combination allows for lower cost networks (due to the lack of switches) and very high-performance bandwidth and latency. As path-rich networks are new to high performance systems, many software libraries cannot take full advantage of them. This project will develop novel methods of using path-rich switchless networks to fully take advantage of all they have to offer. This will involve optimizations to existing popular open-source communication libraries like Open MPI as well as the development of entirely new communication algorithms and methods designed for path-rich network solutions. This project will contribute to a Canadian developed and owned technology at the forefront of ultra high-performance networks, further enhancing Canadian technology competitiveness and training many Canadians in state-of-the-art high demand areas of Cloud computing and Exascale-class scientific computing. This project will train 2 Post-doctoral fellows, 11 PhD students, 13 Master's students and 12 Undergraduate students. Students will learn high-demand skills in Extreme-scale computing directly applicable to scientific supercomputing communication software and hardware as well as to Cloud computing systems. There are a total of 45 Mitacs internship units allocated in this project for students to work alongside Canadian industry in research and development of new high speed networks for the world's largest compute systems. Students on internship will grow their skills in the applications of their research and software development for commercial applications.