Press Releases

Each fall, through its annual Resource Allocation Competitions, Compute Canada hosts a Call for Proposals process for allocations of compute or storage resources. The 2017 Competitions kicked off on September 1st as Compute Canada launched the first stage of its Research Platforms and Portals (RPP) Competition, targeted specifically at applications that create new or support existing research platforms or portals.

Groups are encouraged to consider applying to the RPP Competition if their submission 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.
• Groups that are providing shared data sets accessible using a third party (non-Compute Canada) interface.

Allocations in the RPP Competition may be awarded over multiple years, up to a maximum of three years.

More Information:
For more information on the RPP Competition and other resource competitions for 2017, please visit Compute Canada’s Resource Allocation Competitions page. If you have questions about whether your resource needs fit within the RPP Competition, please contact rac@computecanada.ca.

Compute Canada has put out a call to name the four new national computing systems. This is our chance to put our stamp on those names, especially the two systems which will be hosted within Ontario — a large parallel system based out of the University of Toronto and a general purpose system at the University of Waterloo.

Submission Guidelines:
The names should be Canadian and work bilingually to reflect the national scope of these systems (you do not need to translate them). It’s an opportunity to promote and reflect some key Canadian attributes, such as our unique culture, landscape and geography, history and heritage as well as key scientific or research accomplishments. The name should also reflect strength, unbridled potential, discovery, new frontiers, power and exploration. We would like to include and consider aboriginal themes as well as female scientific accomplishments in Canada as we might be the first with a named prize or infrastructure installation celebrating these areas in research.

Email your suggestions to info@computeontario.ca by August 12th. More info

SHARCNET’s Weiguang Guan was recognized as a Compute Canada Award of Excellence recipient at a gala event held at the 2016 High Performance Computing Symposium (HPCS) conference in Edmonton, Alberta. Mark Dietrich, President and CEO at Compute Canada, announced the latest recipients of this year’s awards in recognition of outstanding support provided to the Canadian research community.

Weiguang is based out of McMaster University providing HPC support specializing in visualization and data analysis programming. Congratulations Weiguang! More info

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.