A Canadian software company and a leading provider of high performance nanophotonic
design software, Lumerical
Solutions Inc., is donating 10 simulation engine licenses of its finite-difference
time-domain (FDTD) software to Compute/Calcul Canada at one of the new WestGrid
installations. The licenses will enable FDTD Solutions' academic customers in
Canada to run, at no additional cost, large simulations on any number of the
3072 cores of WestGrid's Orcinus cluster. Orcinus is a Hewlett-Packard (HP)
c-class blade server cluster with Infiniband interconnect.
Lumerical's FDTD software has been benefiting users across Canada for the past
four years. The simulation software enables researchers in various industries
including biomedical, display technology, communication, optical storage, semiconductor
manufacturing and solid-state lighting, to model light to determine how it interacts
with matter at a very small scale. Studying the interaction of light and matter
is useful when developing complex devices, such as new high efficiency solar
cells, biological sensors and optical interconnects for next generation microprocessing
chips.
"The software provided by Lumerical is helping Compute Canada and WestGrid
support leading-edge research, and advance the computing landscape, in Canada,"
says Rob Simmonds, Chief Technology Officer of WestGrid. "This complex
and computationally intensive software along with WestGrid's high performance
computing capabilities is a powerful combination that is increasing the productivity
of academic research."
"Researchers run a limited number of simulations on the desktop workstations
in their labs, but when they need extra horsepower, they can run large or many
simulations simultaneously on WestGrid's Orcinus" says James Pond, Chief
Technology Officer of Lumerical. "Lumerical is proud to support this kind
of advanced research across Canada."
The photonics and nanostructure research performed by Jeff Young, Professor
in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of British Columbia,
is one example of where Lumerical's software and WestGrid's hardware are used
to run these very large simulations. Young and his team are interested in developing
new optical materials through controlling light at the level of a single photon,
which is the smallest entity of light allowed by quantum mechanics. If light
can be trapped together with an atom, or an artificial atom at a fixed location
on a semiconductor chip, it can generate a new kind of quasi-particle. If this
research group discovers a process to render these new kinds of particles, it
could have many interesting applications in the general area of quantum information
processing. Quantum cryptography is one example, which uses quantum mechanics
to ensure secure sharing of information. "When we first develop an optical
modeling design, we do it locally on smaller computer systems, but when we have
to test the design and get accurate numbers, we run the code for longer periods
of time on WestGrid," says Young. "It would take forever on a basic
computer. FDTD Solutions is the best for producing the ultimate right answer,
so we use it extensively."
"The renewed relationship between WestGrid and Lumerical is helping to
ensure that researchers from universities across Canada have the sophisticated
computational facilities and services required to advance their scientific knowledge
and accelerate innovation," says Susan Baldwin, Executive Director of Compute
/ Calcul Canada, the national high performance computing organization that includes
WestGrid and six other consortia.
Information on FDTD Solutions is available at www.lumerical.com/fdtd.php, and
information on how to access the software through WestGrid is available at www.westgrid.ca/support/software/lumerical.