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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



SHARCNET is pleased to announce the results of its Round VIII 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 made to the following researchers:

  • Susan Brown, English and Theatre Studies, University of Guelph
  • Ranil Sonnadara, Department of Surgery, McMaster University
  • Sidney Segalowitz, Department of Psychology, Brock University
  • Graham Taylor, School of Engineering, University of Guelph
  • Peter Rogan, Biochemistry and Computer Science, Western University

SHARCNET plans to run another competition in late 2016. Please visit our DP website for more information. Congratulations to our Round VIII awardees!



Read the conversation with Mark Daley, Compute Ontario’s Chair of the Board of Directors and upcoming diTHINK speaker, where he discusses the May 26th joint conference between Compute Ontario and ORION. More



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.



This year, Compute Ontario and ORION partner to bring you a joint conference, which combines Compute Ontario Research Day 2016 (CORD2016) and the ORION THINK Conference, into one day at diTHINK.

The event will be held on May 26th at the University of Toronto’s Chestnut Residence and Conference Centre, which already includes a lineup of very interesting speakers.

As part of Compute Ontario’s annual Research Day and the diTHINK diComputing track, we are now accepting abstracts for contributed and poster presentations from professors, postdoctoral, graduate, and undergraduate students which showcase their HPC-related work. Applications are due by April 29. Notification of acceptance will occur on May 9.

For inquiries regarding the scientific community at diTHINK, including contributed and poster presentations, please contact ddvorski@conestogac.on.ca.

A printable poster is also available for distribution.



Compute Canada has announced the launch of its cloud development environment. This service will enable researchers to meet some of today’s advanced research computing challenges with increased flexibility, the ability to customize virtual machines to unique needs, no job queues, and the ability to work interactively.

The Compute Canada Cloud encompasses over 1,200 cores in two environments – east cloud and west cloud – with almost 15,000GB of combined RAM, and runs on OpenStack, a commonly used open-source platform. It will accommodate both data and computationally intensive projects, and its outward facing IP address will enable data sharing and collaboration. More Info