Canada’s most powerful supercomputer is in Sherbrooke

Sherbrooke, QC – According to the international ranking Top500 supercomputers, the Université de Sherbrooke hosts the most powerful computer in Canada, and the 41st most powerful in the world. Called “Mammouth” (French for “mammoth”), it has the combined memory and speed of approximately 20,000 top-of-line personal computers.

The world’s most powerful supercomputer is Japan’s “K Computer” which is four times more powerful than its nearest competitor. Installed at the RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science in Kobe, the K Computer is followed by China’s Tianhe-1A system at the National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin. The largest US system, a Cray XT5 system called Jaguar which is installed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, is in third place.

With Sherbrooke’s Mammouth, scientists from several Canadian universities will perform numerical simulations essential to their research in various branches of engineering, science, medicine, and even in branches traditionally less involved in scientific computing, such as economics and linguistics.

Mammouth consists of 1,630 servers with a total of 39,648 AMD processors (cores), 57,600 gigabytes of RAM and a data storage capacity of 500,000 gigabytes. It can carry 240,000 billion arithmetic operations per second while executing a single program.