Press Releases

Nizar Ladak, Compute Ontario’s new President & CEO, discusses the importance of advanced computing. This is the first of an ongoing monthly series.

“I’ve always been fascinated by technology and its potential to “boldly go where no man has gone before.” Whether as a Trekkie growing up or, almost 30 years later, in a leadership role at a world-changing organization, it has long been clear to me that technology is redefining our world.

Though health care has been my focus, technology has been the through line of my career. Each position I’ve held over the years has had a strong information or technology component, because I see technology as a lever for change.

These are exciting times for advanced computing. Information is being generated from every imaginable activity and comes at us constantly from all corners of the earth. As a result, our ability to ask and answer questions has taken a giant leap forward." More

We are pleased to announce 2016 Ontario Summer School on High Performance Computing – West hosted by SHARCNET. This year, Summer School West will be held from May 30 – June 3 at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario.

Pre-register online NOW

The deadline for Summer School West pre-registration is May 20th at midnight. Please be aware that summer school registration is a two-step process. To finalize the registration one will have to click on a link in an email which will be sent to all attendees a few days before the event.

This five-day summer school includes lectures and labs on programming distributed and multicore systems and on 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. We will also cover common programming languages (including Python and Matlab/Octave) and software packages pertaining to specific research domains.

We are also running a Software Carpentry event in conjunction with our Summer School. This two-day event will teach basic lab skills for scientific computing, and will cover topics of a more introductory nature (including basics of Unix shell and version control) which are normally not covered by our Summer Schools. This workshop will take place on May 24-25 at McMaster University. To register, follow this link.

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 and run through Compute Ontario.

Summer School (central) will run July 11-15 at the University of Toronto, and the University of Ottawa will run Summer School (east) August 8-12. Note that the courses offered by the three sites may be slightly different. Please check the site specific programs for details.

While there is no fee to attend Summer School and Software Carpentry, 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 VIII, applications are encouraged that satisfy the programme objectives and priority will be given to proposals that:

• 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.
• Propose a programme of work that will enable innovative projects from disciplines that are traditionally not major users of HPC.
• Propose to make novel, effective and large-scale use of non-standard architectures especially GP-GPU.

Applications are submitted via SHARCNET’s webportal and are due by May 18, 2016. Consultation with a SHARCNET HPTC prior to submission is required. 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.