I’m overdue for a blog post.  I’ve been very busy following up on some interesting opportunities and have also been “making my mark” with comments on a new Canadian blog based news service. This is a great site for Canadians wishing to make their mark by commenting on posts relevant to their expertise. One of my comments got a bit long and I noticed the posting lost my paragraph breaks, so I thought I would edit it a bit and elaborate further for my blog.

Remember “Mr. Fusion” from the movie “Back to the Future”?  Well the promise of cheap limitless energy from nuclear fusion has been “almost here” for a long time.

I’ve been reading articles on nuclear fusion since I was in high school.  In hind site it’s pretty funny, a couple of nerdy high school kids talking about nuclear fusion after reading about it in a Popular Science magazine they found in the library (PopSci have made their archives available on line BTW, so cool).  Thirty years later, I can’t honestly say that I know much more about nuclear fusion, but an article on the subject is just as temping now as then, so when I saw one in the Mark, I was hoping to discover a Canadian connection.  Failing to find one, I provided one of my own in my comments recaptured below:

Check out the National Ignition Facility home page, it has a great video of how this fusion reaction will be achieved.

I was hoping to see a Canadian angle in the above article on the subject of nuclear fusion. I don’ t know of any, but I’ll tell you about a Canadian connection that might have been.

So how is such a system designed with any confidence that it will work? More importantly, how can they be sure the reaction will not get out of control venting a nuclear cloud over suburban Livermore, California? The answer is supercomputing (often called High Performance Computing or HPC).

The Livermore facility is home to some of the largest supercomputers ever built by the US Department of Energy. When nuclear testing was banned, facilities like the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory were built to turn the task of nuclear research over to computer simulation. To accurately simulate nuclear reactions in a computer requires machines with thousands of identical processors running in perfect synchronization. In March 2005 LLNL built Blue Gene/L with IBM the first supercomputer to exceed 100 TeraFLOPs of performance. But at LLNL, as soon as one machine is built, the plans for the next one begin.

A small Canadian start-up company from Ottawa was invited to propose a computer architecture for a PetaFLOP machine. This proposal was delivered along with a small (refrigerator sized) prototype supercomputer built in Kanata, Ontario by former Nortel engineers. Although the prototype machine was installed at LLNL, and early prototypes achieved many of the performance targets set by LLNL, a system was not purchased. That’s the Canadian connection to nuclear fusion that might have been.

Unfortunately the dream of a Canadian designed and built supercomputer died with the start-up that built them a few weeks ago when they ran out of funds. This company was able to sell a few systems for non-supercomputing tasks, but it was never able to win a supercomputing sale. I often wonder if the Canadian government had purchased a supercomputer from this little company, if it would have been enough to bring it to self-sustainability. Unfortunately our government does not have procurement vehicles to help along start-ups like this. Although Canada may not be directly involved in solving the science and engineering of nuclear fusion, there are other such “grand challenge” problems that are being solved by supercomputing technology.

Canada can have a role if it chooses to invest in supercomputing technology. We toss a bit of money for universities to build some nice systems to support academic research, but there is no national strategy to advance supercomputing technology for industry in Canada. It should be a component of Canada’s Digital Economy Strategy, it is for practically all other advanced nations. Maybe energy comes too easy for Canada, with clean hydro, lots of fossil fuels, and lots of uranium; the relative comfort of the present doesn’t impel us to invest as strongly in the future as we should. “Mr. Fusion” will not likely be invented in Canada, but if some of the new game changing technologies of the future are not invented here, Canada will cease to be one of the best places in the world to live.