Press Releases

Waterloo, Ontario-July 30, 2015. Compute Canada and its regional partners ACENET, Calcul Quebec, Compute Ontario and WestGrid will receive close to $75 million to renew and consolidate the national platform for advanced research computing. Funds will be received through the Canada Foundation for Innovation’s Cyberinfrastructure Initiative competition launched in 2014. The federal investment of $30 million leverages an additional $45 million in provincial and institutional support.

Today’s announcement by Peter Braid, Member of Parliament for Kitchener-Waterloo at an event at the University of Waterloo is a major step forward for Canada’s advanced research computing infrastructure – an important component of Canada’s digital research ecosystem. This essential infrastructure and expert support directly supports the Canadian economy and science excellence. More info

Researchers building platforms or portals to serve the needs of a community of users are invited to apply to Compute Canada’s 2016 Research Platforms and Portals (RPP) competition, which grants access to computing and storage resources on Compute Canada’s systems.

Introduced in 2014, the RPP competition is targeted at applications that use platforms or portals to improve access to shared datasets, enhance existing online research tools and facilities, or advance national or international research collaborations. Resource allocations in this competition may be awarded over multiple years, up to a maximum of three years. The RPP competition is open to any researcher based at a Canadian academic institution who is eligible to apply for funding to the federal granting agencies.

The RPP competition is delivered in two stages:

1. Letter of Intent (LOI) Stage
   This stage is non-competitive and used to ensure project alignment with the RPP competition rules. Submissions are generally one page, providing a high-level summary of the project’s rationale, operation and scope.
2. Full Application Stage
   Successful LOIs will be invited to submit a Full Application. This stage requires further details on the requested Compute Canada resources, operation and management of the platform or portal, and the anticipated impacts and opportunities.

Groups are encouraged to use the RPP competition if their application falls within any of the following categories:

• Resources requested on behalf of a large community of users that will be reallocated to individuals and small groups following the award.
• Applications that provide a public platform that will make use of Compute Canada computing or storage.
• Groups engaging in international agreements to provide multi-year computing or storage solutions based in Canada.
• Recipients of the Major Science Initiative from the Canada Foundation for Innovation.
• Groups that are providing shared data sets accessible using a third party (non-Compute Canada) interface.

Full criteria details and submission guidelines are available in the RPP Competition Guide. Letters of Intent due by August 13, 2015. More info

Compute Canada is pleased to announce its two pairs of scholarships for the 2015 Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI) have been awarded to Gurpreet Singh, a graduate student at the University of Lethbridge, and his co-applicant James Desjardins, a SHARCNET High Performance Computing Consultant at Brock University; and Jonathan Armoza, a graduate student at McGill University, and his co-applicant Félix-Antoine Fortin, a Calcul Québec HPC Analyst at Université Laval. More info

Planning for HPC Summer School 2015 is underway. Summer School (west) which will be held at Western University, London, Ontario from May 25-29th. This five day summer school includes lectures and labs on programming distributed and multicore systems and various topics pertaining to scientific computing. Attendees will learn how to program distributed memory systems--networked computers--known as “clusters”, shared memory multicore systems and GPUs. Attendees will also have a chance to have a review on the basics of computing and techniques as well as software packages for applications in different disciplines.

A long-running event for SHARCNET, Summer School was introduced to users over a decade ago. Summer School is now an Ontario-wide event which is organized in partnership by the three Ontario HPC consortia: SHARCNET, SciNet and HPCVL. Summer School (central) will run from July 13-17 at the University of Toronto, and Queen’s University will run Summer School (east) from July 27-31. Note that the courses offered by the three sites may be slightly different. Please check the site specific programmes for details.

While there is no fee to attend Summer School, registration is required.

SHARCNET is issuing a new call for proposals for Dedicated Programming Support. This programme provides support for computational projects of exceptional potential that will have lasting impact and value and that require significant support from SHARCNET to proceed.

For Round VI, applications are encouraged that satisfy the programme objectives and priority will be given to proposals that:

• Propose to make novel, effective and large-scale use of non-standard architectures especially GP-GPU.
• Propose to develop innovative visualization applications and techniques that emphasize the visualization of large datasets especially using distributed/parallel visualization/rendering techniques.
• Propose a programme of work that will enable innovative projects from disciplines that are traditionally not major users of HPC.

Applications are submitted via SHARCNET’s webportal and are due by April 26, 2015. Note that users must have a SHARCNET webportal account in order to access the online form.

For additional information, please refer to the application guidelines. Questions should be addressed to research-support@sharcnet.ca.