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The Compute Canada Federation invites researchers to apply to its annual Resource Allocation Competitions (RAC). These competitions give researchers the opportunity to have access to more compute, storage and cloud resources. Applications submitted are evaluated for both technical feasibility and scientific excellence.

Proposals to the Resources for Research Groups (RRG) and the Research Platforms and Portals (RPP) competitions must be submitted electronically through the Compute Canada DataBase (CCDB) by Thursday, November 4, 2021, at 11:59 PM (EST).

To be eligible to submit an application to any of the Resource Allocation Competitions, Principal Investigators (PI) and co-PIs must be a faculty member at a Canadian academic institution, and have an active Compute Canada account with an Academic PI role (Faculty, Adjunct Faculty or Librarian).

Q&A sessions are planned as follows:

English: September 29th, noon-1:30 pm (EST) register
French: October 1st, noon-1:30 pm (EST) register



SHARCNET is pleased to announce the results of its Round XVIII Dedicated Programming Support competition. The primary objectives of this program are to enable key research projects with the potential for exceptional and lasting impact that require significant programming support to proceed, and facilitate optimal exploitation of SHARCNET’s or Compute Canada’s computing infrastructure for internationally leading research.

In this Round, programmer allocations have been awarded to:

  • Mark Wachowiak, Computer Science and Mathematics, Nipissing University
  • David Earn, Mathematics and Statistics, McMaster University

SHARCNET plans to run another competition later this year. Please visit our DP website for more information.



Registration is now open for our annual SHARCNET Summer School on Advanced Research Computing. The school is an annual educational event for graduate/undergraduate students, postdocs and researchers who are engaged in compute-intensive research. These schools are free and provide beginner-to-intermediate level courses on a wide range of subjects, from traditional high performance computing (MPI, CUDA) to data science, machine learning, and popular languages (Python, R etc.); they also include domain-specific courses.

In the past, this event was run in person (five days, three parallel streams) on one of SHARCNET’s campuses, but this year it will run entirely online (same as last year), due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It will start on May 25 as a single stream event and will run until Canada Day.

Programme

  • Getting Started: The Shell and Scheduler: May 25, 26
  • Modern C++ and Parallel Programming: May 28, 31, June 1
  • Modern Fortran: June 2, 3, 4
  • Python for HPC: June 7, 8, 9
  • CUDA: June 10, 11, 14
  • Parallel Programming with MPI: June 15, 16, 17
  • Deep Learning Foundation: June 18, 21
  • Bioinformatics: June 22, 23
  • Parallel Debugging and Profiling: June 24, 25
  • R for Statistical Computing: June 28, 29

Summer School Registration

Participants need to register to attend SHARCNET Summer School. Registration is per-course, with no limits on the number of courses. All attendees are required to have a Compute Canada account before registering. Compute Canada accounts are free, but one has to be affiliated with a Canadian academic institution to qualify for one. Click here to apply for a Compute Canada account. Note that it might take a couple of business days to get your account approved.

Once you have a Compute Canada account, you can login to our training web site using your Compute Canada credentials. Then follow this link to register for Summer School courses.

Registration is limited, on a first come, first served basis, so please register early!



SHARCNET is issuing a call for proposals for Dedicated Programming Support Round XVIII. Applications are encouraged that satisfy the programme objectives and priority will be given to proposals that meet one or more of the following conditions:

  • Propose an innovative project that will leverage the capabilities of the national systems, such as “Graham” and the cloud.
  • Propose a programme of work that deals with the efficient processing of large, heterogeneous datasets using a variety of data mining, machine learning or other analytics software.

Applications are submitted via SHARCNET’s webportal and are due by May 21, 2021 at 11:59 pm EST. Please note that consultation with a SHARCNET HPTC prior to submission is a programme requirement.

Due to the current workload of SHARCNET programming staff, only a limited number of proposals are expected to be awarded in this round. For additional information, please refer to the application guidelines. Questions should be addressed to research-support@sharcnet.ca.



This does not impact Graham Cloud.

On June 1, 2021, the SHARCNET Cloud will be powered off and decommissioned. We kindly ask you to follow these steps before May 1, 2021:

  • If your workload in the SHARCNET cloud is no longer required, please login to the cloud dashboard and delete your VMs.
  • If you continue to require cloud resources, we invite you to request resources in Compute Canada Clouds. More details on the request process are available in the Compute Canada documentation wiki.
  • If you continue to require cloud resources that GEOGRAPHICALLY MUST BE LOCATED AT UWO, please reach out to us directly for alternative arrangements.


Building on four successful years hosting a national Visualize This! Challenge, the Compute Canada Visualization Working Group is joining forces with IEEE to co-host the 2021 IEEE SciVis Contest, an international competition to create novel approaches and state-of-the-art visualizations that help domain scientists better understand challenging datasets.



Canada’s national advanced research computing (ARC) platform is delivered through the Compute Canada Federation (CCF), which is a partnership of Compute Canada, regional organizations (WestGrid, Compute Ontario, Calcul Québec and ACENET) and institutions across Canada. Providing researchers with access to the infrastructure and expertise they need to accomplish globally competitive, data-driven, transformative research, this national ARC platform serves the needs of more than 18,000 users, including over 4,850 faculty based at Canadian institutions as of January 1, 2021.

For RAC 2021, the national ARC platform provided approximately 233,000 CPU cores, 62,000 virtual CPUs, 2,610 GPUs and 150 PB of storage on Cedar (Simon Fraser University), Graham (University of Waterloo), Niagara (University of Toronto), and Béluga (Calcul Québec).

Ongoing growth in researcher demand for resources means that demand continues to outstrip supply. The 2021 RAC competition received the highest number of applications in its history with 651 projects submitted — 10% more applications than 2020. This year’s RAC was only able to award 40% of the total compute requested, 90% of the total storage requested, and 22% of the total GPUs requested. This year’s RAC was able to allocate 100% of the total vCPUs (virtual CPUs) requested on the Arbutus, Béluga, Cedar and Graham clouds.

While close to 80% (on average) of the resources available are allocated through the RAC, the CCF reserves a target of 20% for researchers to use through the Rapid Access Service (RAS), which grants all users access to modest quantities of compute, storage and cloud resources as soon as they have a Compute Canada account.

If you have any questions about the report, contact the CCF RAC Team.



SHARCNET is pleased to announce the results of its Round XVII Dedicated Programming Support competition. The primary objectives of this program are to enable key research projects with the potential for exceptional and lasting impact that require significant programming support to proceed, and facilitate optimal exploitation of SHARCNET’s or Compute Canada’s computing infrastructure for internationally leading research.

In this Round, programmer allocations have been awarded to:

  • Sheridan Houghten, Computer Science, Brock University
  • Colin Denniston, Applied Mathematics, Western University
  • Andrew Roger, Biochemistry & Molecular Biology, Dalhousie University
  • Michael Cottam, Physics & Astronomy, Western University

SHARCNET plans to run another competition later this year. Please visit our DP website for more information.