Building a national platform for High Performance Computing

Over the last few years, rapid developments in technology have revolutionized the way research is done. Once used by only a limited number of researchers in a few select fields, high performance computing (HPC) is now an essential tool for advancing the frontiers in all areas of research.

The CFI led a collaborative initiative with the three federal research funding agencies—CIHR, NSERC, SSHRC—and several other partners to create a national HPC network across Canada. This network builds upon seven regional HPC consortia in which the CFI has invested previously, and takes advantage of the exceptional capabilities provided by CANARIE, the world's first national optical Internet research and education network.

This trans-continental HPC system will link virtually all of Canada’s research-intensive institutions, and will do for Canada’s knowledge-intensive economy of the 21st century what the building of a trans-continental railway did for the natural resource and industrial economies of centuries past.