Our Partners
Advanced Research Computing (ARC) in Ontario is supported by a complex network of organizations that includes research and academic institutions, government agencies, hospitals, and private companies. These organizations provide the computing clusters, expertise, and bandwidth that we refer to as Digital Research Infrastructure (DRI). It’s an ecosystem that has grown organically over many years, and is becoming more complex. Researchers need integrated support and services that span data collection, computation and analysis, data management and knowledge translation. A key aspect of Compute Ontario’s role is to facilitate collaboration and alignment across the ecosystem.
Ontario Service Providers
In Ontario, the largest providers of ARC resources are four consortia based at universities and hospitals. These academic consortia support two of the country’s current five national ARC platforms: Niagara (at the University of Toronto) and Graham (at the University of Waterloo). They play an essential role in providing access to ARC systems, programming expertise, training, data storage and data management to researchers in Ontario and across Canada.
The Centre for Advanced Computing (at Queen’s University), specializes in secure, advanced computing resources and support for academic and medical researchers.
HPC4Health HPC4Health is a consortium of health providers who are working together to build the next-generation of compute engine for clinical research.
SHARCNET is a consortium comprising 18 colleges, universities and research institutes operating a network of high-performance computer clusters across south western, central, and northern Ontario.
SciNet (consortium at the University of Toronto) is Canada’s largest supercomputing centre, providing Canadian researchers with computational resources and expertise necessary to perform their research on scales not previously possible in Canada.
ORION provides high-speed, fibre-optic network services to support research, education and innovation.
Regional and National Partners
Nationally, the Digital Research Alliance of Canada was launched in 2020 to coordinate and fund activities in advanced research computing (ARC), research data management (RDM) and research software (RS), working collaboratively with stakeholders across the country, including Compute Ontario and its regional counterparts: ACENET (New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, PEI and Newfoundland and Labrador); Calcul Québec; PrairiesDRI and BC DRI Committee.
Funders
We gratefully acknowledge the support provided to researchers and DRI by the Ontario Ministry of Colleges and Universities and the Canada Foundation for Innovation.