Two Canadian universities have been awarded a grant to upgrade their advanced research computing infrastructure.
The Digital Research Alliance of Canada (the Alliance) and the Ontario Ministry of Colleges and Universities (MCU) have jointly awarded the University of Waterloo (UWaterloo) and the University of Toronto investments totaling CA$95.4 million (US$70m).
UWaterloo received an investment of CA$43 million (US$31.2m) which will be used by the university to renew the high-performance computing infrastructure and cloud storage at its Graham Data Centre.
In 2017 UWaterloo launched Graham, the largest supercomputer at any Canadian university at the time. Named after former university professor J. Wesley Graham, the Huawei-based system has 2.6 petaflops of peak theoretical computational performance and is entirely liquid-cooled, using rear-door heat exchangers.
It ranked 500 on the June 2020 edition of the Top500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers but has since dropped off the list.
No information has been provided about the upgrades that will be made to Graham with the funding, but in a statement, UWaterloo said the investment would “enable faster processing speeds, greater storage capacity and improved reliability to better address the needs of researchers across Canada.”
Meanwhile, the Alliance and MCU also jointly awarded the University of Toronto more than CA$52 million (US$37.7m) to upgrade the compute infrastructure of its Niagara system, operated by SciNet – the supercomputer center at the University of Toronto.
First deployed in 2018, Niagara has 6.25 petaflops of peak theoretical computational performance and ranked 241 on the latest edition of the Top500. It was last expanded in 2020 and now consists of 80,640 cores across 2,016 nodes.
"To make new discoveries and innovations in priority areas such as artificial intelligence, cancer research, and advanced manufacturing, Ontario’s researchers need access to the most powerful digital infrastructure,” said Nolan Quinn, Ontario’s minister of colleges and universities. “That’s why the Ontario government is proud to support the upgrade and operation of the province’s advanced research computing systems, solidifying our position at the forefront of innovation.”
