Before Mississauga, Ont.-based Atomic Energy Canada Ltd. (AECL) switched to a high-performance computing (HPC) technology, the nuclear products and services company relied on costly symmetric multi-processing machines to perform product modeling and simulations.
“We’re modeling nuclear reactions down to the neutron. That’s why something like an HPC environment is very important to us,” said AECL’s manager of infrastructure services, Simon Galton.
Besides reaping the horsepower of HPC in the engineering support of nuclear products, Galton said an environment composed of individual machines allows for scalability and easier replacement of units as technology improves.