A significant funding announcement on the College of Waterloo goals to maintain Ontario – and particularly Waterloo – on the map as a North American tech hub.
The federal and provincial governments have invested over $95 million to extend the capability of supercomputers at UW’s Quantum Nano Centre and the College of Toronto.
The funding will probably be used to “renew high performance computing (HPC) and cloud storage infostructure,” in keeping with a media launch from the Digital Analysis Alliance of Canada.
The College of Waterloo has obtained roughly $43 million to improve the Nano Centre’s supercomputer, named “Graham,” operated by SHARCNET. It’s hoped they’ll improve storage capability by at the least 20 per cent.
“Graham is more of a general purpose system, that allows many researchers to take advantage of high performance computing at the same time,” defined Dr. Ranil Sonnadara, CEO of Compute Ontario.
The Quantum Nano Centre on the College of Waterloo.
The College of Toronto, in the meantime, obtained about $52.4 million to improve their “Niagara” supercomputer operated by SciNet, to extend its capability by at the least 80 per cent.
Sonnadara described Niagara as “a large capacity system.”
“It’s a very large-scale parallel system that specializes [in] ending very large computations that can’t be done anywhere else,” he stated. “Both are supercomputers, they’re just different kinds of supercomputer.”
Each are used to advance completely different fields of analysis, the whole lot from local weather change, to healthcare, to AI and sustainable transportation.
“We also have a sustainable aviation project that’s hosted at the University of Waterloo, where we’re thinking about how can we not use fossil fuel power for sustainable aviation,” stated Dr. Charmaine Dean, UW’s vice-president of analysis & worldwide.
Because of the funding, Dean stated the College of Waterloo can now use their very own cash to scale back their carbon footprint.
“We’re taking the heat from the Graham computer and using it to power this building and the building next to it,” she defined. “So, a major sustainability investment that is funded completely by the University of Waterloo to support sustainable use of the equipment.”
