Ryan Grant, Sc’04, MSc’05, PhD’12, has spent his career pushing the boundaries of supercomputing, a technology powerful enough to tackle everything from predicting natural disasters to advancing medical research. Queen’s is now investing in this same frontier, with plans to build a supercomputer that will rank in the top 20 globally and transform research and student learning across disciplines. You can help accelerate discoveries like these by supporting the , which fuels world-class research at Queen’s – including the future of supercomputing.
The story below is an excerpt from a recent Queen’s Alumni Review profile of Dr. Grant, highlighting his work at the forefront of this rapidly evolving field. Read the full feature by Blair Crawford, Artsci’86, here.
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 , 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.
Read the full Queen’s Alumni Review feature on Dr. Grant here, and help drive research breakthroughs at Queen’s like his by supporting the .
