Technology Renewal

Compute Canada Federation has run one of the biggest technology renewals in the country’s history, in an effort to ensure the ongoing operation of, support for, and investment in Canada’s ARC platform.

In recent years, the Compute Canada Federation (CCF), which provides Canada’s national advanced research computing (ARC) platform for academic researchers across the country, has run one of the biggest technology renewals in the country’s history, in an effort to ensure the ongoing operation of, support for, and investment in Canada’s ARC platform.

Between 2015 and 2018, CCF used funding from the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) to replace aging systems with five new ones that consolidated resources and centralized services.

Canada’s national ARC platform, by the numbers (2019-2020)
  • 15,994 Total users
  • 4,442 Faculty users
  • 3,379 Institutional users from 113 Countries
  • 2,671 R&D Idustrial collaborations
  • 8,306 Publications
  • 705 Spinoffs
  • 405 Patents
Vision 

World-class Canadian science has and will continue to benefit from modern and capable resources for computational- and data-focused research. By co-operating with government funding agencies and digital research infrastructure providers, we deliver the most advanced and integrated systems to support the data-research cycle, allowing researchers and their industrial partners to compete globally.

Renewal of a state-of-the-art ecosystem

Back in 2015, our ecosystem featured 27 data centres, 50 systems, 200,000 cores, 2 petaflops (the ability for a computer to do one quadrillion floating-point operations per second) and 20 petabytes. Fast-forward five years and it has transformed into five national systems, 284,322 cores, 348PB and more than 200 experts to respond to the needs of Canadian researchers by delivering world-class ARC infrastructure and services. 

The compute available to researchers includes 238,144 GPUs, 2,706 CPUs and 43,472 vCPUs (or virtual CPUs on cloud).

For more information, see our Available Resources.

Find out more about the national advanced research computing (ARC) platform, available to researchers across Canada.

New national systems

Initially, a national competition concluded with four new national sites chosen to host four new systems, namely Arbutus (University of Victoria); Cedar (Simon Fraser University); Graham (University of Waterloo); Niagara (University of Toronto). Later, the Béluga (McGill University/Calcul Québec) system joined to make a national total of five. 

As part of the national DRI strategy, $50 million was dedicated to the immediate expansion of ARC capacity at the five existing national host sites. This capacity expansion was completed March 31, 2020. For more information about the national DRI strategy and future plans for the ARC platform, visit this page.

For more technical information on each system, visit this page. 

More information 

Read more about the technology renewal process on this page.