Simon Fraser University (SFU) in British Columbia, Canada, has deployed a new supercomputer at its Burnaby campus.

The CA$80 million ($58.6m) system, dubbed Fir, replaces the Cedar system that is currently housed at SFU’s Cedar Supercomputing Centre.

Built by Lenovo, Fir comprises AMD Epyc 9454 CPUs and Nvidia H100 GPUs, interconnected by InfiniBand and offering a total of 19.96 petaflops of FP64 compute power. It ranked 78 on the most recent edition of the Top500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers.

The system will be made accessible to researchers across Canada and used to support workloads that require significant computational power, including GPU-intensive model training, simulation, and large-scale deployment.

“The new Fir supercomputer represents a much-needed, major upgrade to the national Canadian computing infrastructure,” said Dugan O’Neil, SFU’s vice president, research and innovation. “The growing importance of data for research in all types of academia and in industry continues to drive demand for high-performance computing, and we are meeting that need. Fir will drive research across Canada, and I have no doubt it will facilitate significant advances in a wide range of fields in the coming years.”

The university first announced plans for the successor to Cedar in June 2024. Fir has been funded by investments that included CA$41 million ($30m) from the Digital Research Alliance of Canada and CA$25 million ($18m) from the Province of British Columbia, via the B.C. Knowledge Development Fund. An additional CA$15 million ($11m) was put forward by partners of the university.