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Understanding the past

Sophie Norris, assistant professor in the Department of Geography, has received $132,271 to create “The Geomorphology and Chronology Research Lab - A new technological research facility to determine the age of earth surface processes.”  

Contemporary climatic change includes impacts with global consequences such as rising sea levels, decreased freshwater resources and enhanced erosion. But current observations of these effects on glacial environments only span a few decades, so scientists rely on reconstructions of the past to predict responses to future climate change.  

Norris’s Geomorphology and Chronology Research (GCR) Lab will build precise geochronological records from regions of BC and Canada that were in the past encompassed by ice sheets and glaciers. Using radiometric dating of rock and organic material (including terrestrial cosmogenic nuclide and radiocarbon dating techniques), the facility will be foundational for our understanding of past glacial changes including glacial lake expansion and drainage, glacial recession and glacial erosion.  

In the long term, the technology developed by Norris and her team will enable scientists to use the BC and Canadian landscape as a data-rich environment that offers records spanning centuries and even millennia. This will improve our ability to predict how glacial environments in Canada and globally will respond to future climatic change.  

“This infrastructure,” adds Norris, “will also provide exceptional opportunities to train the next generation of BC and Canadian researchers at the forefront of climate science.”

Advanced manufacturing technologies

While traditional manufacturing methods have inherent limitations in terms of material design and geometries, additive manufacturing (AM), also known as three-dimensional or 3D printing, allows for greater flexibility and optimization in design. 

With $290,000 in CFI-JELF funding for “Multi-scale additive manufacturing for sustainable development,” the UVic team of Bosco Yu (Mechanical Engineering), Sravya Tekumalla (Mechanical Engineering) and Rishi Gupta (Civil Engineering) will acquire a state-of-the-art laser powder bed fusion-based metal 3D printer. With this, they’ll develop novel alloys with engineered microstructures, tunable metamaterials and architected materials, lightweight materials and structures, and sustainable reinforcement materials. Some of the outputs will be made from alloys that have a lower carbon footprint; that are corrosion resistant and longer lasting thus increasing the service life of structures; and will have a higher strength, thus reducing the cross section of the materials.

These advances in structural technology will enable the production of innovative materials for applications including biomedical devices, aerospace components and eco-friendly civil infrastructure. 

While the manufacturing sector plays a crucial role in Canada's economy, it has not been a major player in BC. The researchers expect that the knowledge generated by this project will add to BC’s understanding of AM and contribute to future possible expansion in regional industry.   

Embracing advanced manufacturing technologies, they point out, is essential for remaining competitive on the international stage. 

Energy efficient computing

Thomas Baker and Heather Russell’s (Chemistry, and Physics and Astronomy) $90,800 “Energy efficient computing infrastructure for research in quantum physics” adds a new type of computing infrastructure to the nationwide Digital Research Alliance.

Reduced Instruction Set Computers (RISC) have emerged as a remarkably efficient alternative to conventional computers, offering comparable or even superior performance while consuming significantly less power. RISC architectures have recently found their way into large-scale research-grade computers called Advanced RISC Machines (ARM), enabling a shift in scientific computing.

Baker and Russell’s project will introduce ARM-based computers to the Enterprise Data Centre, the current home of the Arbutus cloud system at UVic.

Baker is an assistant professor in the departments of Chemistry and Physics & Astronomy and holds a Canada Research Chair in Quantum Computing for Modeling of Molecules and Materials. Russell is an assistant professor in Physics & Astronomy and a member of the ATLAS Collaboration, one of the major international particle physics experiments. Both rely on powerful and fast computers to process large amounts of data while avoiding a huge increase in power use and heat generation.  This project marks the first time that an ARM-based resource is available to researchers all over Canada.

To manage the vast amount of data collected at the ATLAS experiment, Russell needs computational resources capable of handling large data sets, training machine-learning algorithms, and modelling complex particle physics processes. Baker’s work on quantum information theory, including methods to make and use quantum computers, also requires significant computational investment.

The new ARM-based computing cluster will be installed at UVic this fall and have a public debut soon after. This large-scale cluster will help Russell, Baker, and other Canadian researchers do more research faster and more efficiently. Ultimately, it will help to entice researchers to shift research into a more energy-efficient future.