SHARCNET (Shared Hierarchical Academic Research Computing NETwork) is a consortium of academic and research organisations in Ontario, Canada. It provides researchers with the massive computational resources they need to advance their work across multiple disciplines: from modelling the movement of pollution and creating more efficient electronics, to achieving a greater understanding of the outbreak of diseases like SARS. SHARCNET recently took delivery of four HP Cluster Platform 4000 systems with a total of 1900 HP ProLiant servers based on AMD Opteron processors running HP Linux-based XC System Software.

"When we took the decision to implement a Grid computing facility for multidisciplinary research, there was a clear need for a comprehensive HPC development toolkit that would help users make best-use of this system. Given the breadth of our existing user base, and the need to encourage new users and disciplines to develop new applications, it was essential that these tools were both powerful and very easy to use. After extensive testing, we chose to adopt Allinea's tools: DDT for small to large-scale parallel debugging and OPT for profiling", commented Hugh Couchman, SHARCNET Scientific Director and McMaster Professor for SHARCNET organisation. "We were particularly pleased to see that Allinea has adopted a licensing model that is aligned with our Grid computing model and that can meet our growing user requirements.”

"As computing Grids bring together a more diverse user base and multiple HPC architectures, the need for intuitive, cross-platform development and optimization tools is becoming critical to the success of scientific R&D”, stated Dr. David Lecomber, CTO of Allinea Software. "We welcome the opportunity to work closely with major Grid computing initiatives and in particular with SHARCNET and HP, to ensure that we maintain our technical and commercial lead within this Grid computing space.”