Press Releases

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.

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.

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.

The Ontario Summer School on advanced research Computing is an annual educational event for graduate/undergraduate students, postdocs and researchers who are engaged in a compute intensive research. Held geographically in the west, centre and east of the province of Ontario, the summer school provides attendees with the opportunity to learn and share knowledge and experience in high performance and advanced research computing on modern HPC platforms. This year, the training will run online from May 19-June 16, 2020.

Courses include:

• Getting Started
• Bioinformatics
• C++
• CUDA
• Julia
• Machine Learning
• Message Passing Interface (MPI)
• Using Graham before & after job scheduling
• Python Programming
• Slurm Scheduling on Graham

The courses are between 1 and 3 days long and consist of live Zoom lecturing sessions interleaved with live Zoom hands-on sessions. Classes begin at 9am EST, ending at 5pm.

These schools are FREE and provide beginner-to-intermediate level courses on a wide range of subjects. Register here. Due to the popularity of these sessions, a second Summer School is being offered from August 17-21, 2020.

SHARCNET is issuing a call for proposals for Dedicated Programming Support Round XVI. 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 (“big data”) using a variety of data mining, machine learning or other analytics software.

Applications are submitted via SHARCNET’s webportal and are due by April 19, 2020 at 11:59 pm EST. Consultation with a SHARCNET HPTC prior to submission is required.

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.