University of Waterloo's supercomputer gets a big funding boost

A major funding announcement at the University of Waterloo aims to keep Ontario – and specifically Waterloo – on the map as a North American tech hub.

The federal and provincial governments have invested over $95 million to increase the capacity of supercomputers at UW’s Quantum Nano Centre and the University of Toronto.

The funding will be used to “renew high performance computing (HPC) and cloud storage infostructure,” according to a media release from the Digital Research Alliance of Canada.

The University of Waterloo has received roughly $43 million to upgrade the Nano Centre’s supercomputer, named "Graham," operated by SHARCNET. It’s hoped they can increase storage capacity by at 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,” explained Dr. Ranil Sonnadara, CEO of Compute Ontario.

The Quantum Nano Centre at the University of Waterloo.

The University of Toronto, meanwhile, got about $52.4 million to upgrade their "Niagara" supercomputer operated by SciNet, to increase its capacity by at 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 said. “Both are supercomputers, they're just different kinds of supercomputer.”

Both are used to advance different fields of research, everything from climate 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,” said Dr. Charmaine Dean, UW’s vice-president of research & international.

Thanks to the investment, Dean said the University of Waterloo can now use their own money to reduce 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 explained. “So, a major sustainability investment that is funded completely by the University of Waterloo to support sustainable use of the equipment.”