The first computer program Ryan Grant ever wrote let him move a crude rendering of a hot air balloon around the glowing blue screen of his Commodore 64.
He was five years old.
Today, nearly four decades later, the software he designs is essential for the supercomputers that are the backbone of artificial intelligence and that are used for everything from designing new drugs to forecasting weather.
The skills Dr. Grant, Sc’04, MSc’05, PhD’12, developed bouncing a hot air balloon around on a primitive home computer now support him in designing the software that interprets the nearly limitless complexity of our planet’s weather systems.
“I took a very keen interest in computers at a very, very young age,” says Dr. Grant, an assistant professor in computer engineering with Smith Engineering at Queen’s.
“I can distinctly remember going with my mother to Zellers before Christmas when I was four to buy a Commodore 64,” he says. “I loved that thing from the moment we got it.
“I think computers were a draw because the idea of controlling what was on your TV screen was just so new at that time,” he says. “Up until then, electronics were really a spectator activity. Computers brought that out into something that let you be creative, play a game with friends, just do whatever you could think of. It was like Lego blocks – it’s a creative toy and a fun one at that.”
That love of computers still burns today, with Dr. Grant and his colleagues at Smith Engineering putting Queen’s on the map in Canada’s supercomputing industry.
Coming to Queen’s in 2021 after spending nine years working with the world’s most advanced supercomputers at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, N.M., was more than just a career change. For Dr. Grant, it was a homecoming.
Not only is he an alumnus, but he and his family have deep roots in Kingston – and at Queen’s.
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Photography by Jana Chytilova
The connection began with Dr. Grant’s great-grandfather on his mother’s side. Alfred Plumb was a janitor at the school’s former Students’ Memorial Union in the 1920s.
“He worked there for 40 years. I know that because I have a silver platter that says, “A.H. Plumb, thank you for your 40 years of service,” Dr. Grant says.
“He was nicknamed Sarge. He taught the students Morse code,” Dr. Grant says. “He was a First World War veteran, but sergeant wasn’t his rank. They called him that because he was a little bit ornery. He didn’t have time for nonsense.”
That included chastising students if he found them with their feet up on the tables, according to family lore.
Alf and his family, including daughter Gwendolyn Plumb, Dr. Grant’s grandmother, boarded Queen’s students at their house on Earl Street. Eventually, Gwen Plumb found a job at Queen’s as well, working as a maid for students in Leonard Hall.
“Back in the day, student residence rooms actually had janitorial service. They would come into your room, clean it up, and make your bed for you,” Dr. Grant says.
“The students used to dissect frogs in their rooms, even though they weren’t supposed to. That would freak her out. She was not one for creepy crawlies.”
Dr. Grant’s mother, Judy Grant (nee Bedford) attended Queen’s for her BSc (Geography, ’73). Judy and Dr. Grant’s father, William Grant, settled in Ottawa’s west end, nurturing young Ryan’s interest in the new field of home computing and in his Commodore 64.
“I was actually working on it before I went to kindergarten. I’d start tapping away and put together simple programs, working from this big, gigantic instruction book. I read at an early age and it seemed simple for me. I was always tinkering with computers,” he says.
“There was a really nice scene in that area of Ottawa where I grew up. All the kids in the neighbourhood had home computers and were interested in playing games on them and doing interesting things. The parents were around to help a little bit but, for the most part, all the kids got better than the parents pretty quickly.”
There was never any doubt that Dr. Grant would study computer engineering. Though he was offered a full scholarship to attend Carleton University, he chose Queen’s.
“I wouldn’t say I chose Queen’s just because the family went here, but there was a strong pull,” he says. “Mostly I wanted to try something new – outside of Ottawa.”
And there was another draw: he could live cheaply, staying with his grandparents, Gwen and Donald, at their home on Windsor Street, in Kingston’s Reddendale neighbourhood.
After graduating, he worked for a while with the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission.
“I could have gone anywhere, but Queen’s has some advantages in this space. Queen’s has some of the fastest-growing AI research programs in Canada.”
“I worked in an area where people had advanced degrees and all the interesting stuff seemed to be happening for people who had advanced degrees,” he says.
He was soon back at Queen’s to do his master’s in computer engineering. He submitted his first paper the morning of Sept. 9, 2005. He remembers the date easily: later that afternoon he married Meagan Grant (nee Garrett, Sc’04 civil engineering). The couple met in a mechanical drafting lab as undergraduates.
After completing his PhD at Queen’s in 2012, Dr. Grant took jobs in the United States. He was recruited to join Sandia National Laboratories, where he worked with some of the largest, most powerful supercomputers in the world.
“In the States I was building this world-class stuff. I had awesome toys to play with,” he says.
Compared to the United States – or indeed most countries in the world – Canada is in the minor leagues of supercomputing. Supercomputing power is measured in “flops” – floating operations per second (see accompanying story) – and a rough way to rank a country’s supercomputing resources is to add up the number of petaflops in its national inventory.
Canada’s total is 41.5 petaflops (a petaflop is a million billion floating operations per second).
“Canada is one-tenth the size of the United States so you’d hope that we would have one-tenth of its supercomputing power,” – which would put the U.S. at about 410 petaflops, he says. “In fact, the U.S. has 4,400 petaflops. And they are about to add another 2,000 petaflops to that.”
Canada lags even non-superpowers. Brazil has 53 petaflops, Poland 65, Italy 330, and Japan 672.
“We’re behind by orders of magnitude,” he explains.
It’s one of the reasons he returned home to Canada – and to Queen’s.
“I wish Canada was in better shape in the supercomputer world,” he says.
“One of the big challenges is that worldwide there’s just not a lot of supercomputer experts. We just don’t have a lot of experience in Canada building those really, really big systems. There are no dedicated institutions in Canada to building supercomputers and keeping us on the forefront,” he says. “Other countries have built up national laboratories that are constantly concentrating on questions like, ‘How do we build the next one? What are the bottlenecks we need to resolve?’”
Dr. Grant hopes he can bring some of that expertise to Canada.
“That was really my driving motivation – to provide opportunity for Canadians to enter the industry and to provide opportunities for Canada as a nation to be able to capitalize on supercomputing expertise to drive the economy, to solve productivity problems here in Canada, and just make us the world leader that we should be in this space,” he says.
Why Queen’s?
“I could have gone anywhere, but Queen’s has some advantages in this space. Queen’s has some of the fastest-growing AI research programs in Canada. It has accessible land. It has plenty of water. It has capacity for power. And it’s nice and conveniently located between Toronto, Montreal, and Ottawa.”
The location is important. With Canada’s limited supercomputing infrastructure, companies and institutions that need the power of a supercomputer might find they need to share that resource. Additionally, some supercomputing tasks are highly sensitive. Users may need to be using the computer directly, not logging in from elsewhere.
“If you’re training AI to consult with wealth clients at a bank, do you really want that information sitting on the internet? What about personal health data? Probably not.”
AI also plays a key role in national defence and signals intelligence and Queen’s is close to the Royal Military College, the Canadian Defence Academy, and other military institutions.
“Suppose in the future another nation develops antagonistic AI that attacks all of our infrastructure. How do you defend that? You need defensive AI. How do you build that? You need a supercomputer,” Dr. Grant says. “In the future, battle can be these AI systems in cyberspace battling each other, trying to find ways to break through.”
Beyond that, Queen’s and Kingston are just wonderful places to live and work, he says.
“I think it’s really exciting to be back at Queen’s and to be contributing. I regard it not just as fun and a great place to be, but coming back to serve my own nation after working in the U.S. for so long. I’m glad to be back.”
Supercomputing 101
The adage “many hands make light work” is a pretty good analogy for the modern supercomputer, which really isn’t a single computer at all. The “hands” in this case are a network of thousands, even tens of thousands, of high-end processors working in unison on the same problem.
That problem could be finding new drug treatments, analyzing experimental results in subatomic research, or the study of astrophysics to help us understand our universe. In Japan, supercomputers are improving predictions of earthquakes and tsunamis. Environment Canada harnesses supercomputing power to improve its daily weather forecast.
Supercomputers gave us the two-metre rule used during the COVID-19 pandemic, while the explosion in the use of artificial intelligence wouldn’t be possible without the staggering power of supercomputers.
The largest supercomputer in the world covers about 650 square metres and would fit comfortably into the floorspace of Grant Hall. But it’s not their size that makes supercomputers “super” – it’s their speed.
“We judge these things in what we call ‘flops,’ floating-point operations per second,” Dr. Ryan Grant says. “Basically, it’s just a calculation. Can I take two decimal numbers and multiply them together? How many of those can I do in a second?”
In the realm of supercomputing, that number is astounding. “People understand the terms ‘mega’ and ‘giga’ because that’s how you measure the memory in your own computer,” Dr. Grant says. But those measurements are inadequate when talking about the power of a supercomputer.
“A petaflop is a million billion operations per second. And an exaflop is a billion billion operations per second,” he says. “The world’s fastest supercomputer has just broken the exaflop barrier.”
The secret to supercomputing lies in how to make those individual processors communicate with each other. For that you need maximum bandwidth – the amount of information that can be carried – and minimal latency – the speed at which the information travels through the network.
Imagine a factory of 30,000 workers co-operating on the same task.
“It’s the co-ordination to get all those people moving together that’s hard,” Dr. Grant says. “When we talk about communicating between systems, we’re talking in the hundreds of nanoseconds.”
Designing the software that controls those networks is Dr. Grant’s specialty.
“That’s my bag of tricks. I do new network designs and I solve problems,” he says. “I’m very proud to say that one of the network specifications I worked on – the software interface design for networks that helps dictate how the hardware is designed – that's in every single exascale supercomputer in the world.”
