The University of Regina installed Canada's largest Lattice Quantum ChromoDynamics (LQCD) computer facility in 2004 to study the fundamental aspects of the universe and the nature of matter. Randy Lewis, who joined the university's physics department in 1997, was named a Canada Research Chair in 2003 and received financial assistance from the federal and provincial governments to conduct the research. LQCD is the large-scale computing technique used by physicists around the world to develop a theoretical understanding of nature in terms of subatomic particles. The Regina computer, about the size of a five-drawer filing cabinet, is built from 260 Pentium-4 processors with more than 13,000 Gigabytes of disk space. Within a few months of being installed, the Regina facility had already attracted scientists from the TRIUMF Lab in Vancouver, the University of Saskatchewan, and the University College of the Fraser Valley to discuss research opportunities. The computer is also being used by teams of scientists from York University and Simon Fraser University; special access is granted through an encrypted on-line connection to allow remote computers to talk to Regina's LQCD computer.
Joe Ralko