Digital Research Alliance of Canada

Compute Canada turned into Digital Research Alliance of Canada (“the Alliance”) which offers Advanced Research Computing. It is an arm’s-length nonprofit primarily funded by ISED. The big centers are:

• McGill University (Montreal)
• University of Victoria
• Simon Fraser University
• Waterloo
• University of Toronto

In October 2024, University of Toronto announced it was awarded C$52M to replace their Niagara system.¹

In June 2024, Simon Fraser University received over C$80M to replace their 192-node V100-based Cedar supercomputer with one named Fir. Of this money, 50% came from the Alliance, 30% came from the province, and the remainder came from “in-kind contributions from partners.”² Fir will have 640 H100 GPUs.³

George Ross is the CEO of the Digital Research Alliance of Canada. Their full staff roster is online.⁴

Footnotes

1. U of T receives $52 million to upgrade SciNet supercomputer ↩

2. SFU awarded $80 million to upgrade supercomputing facility - SFU News - Simon Fraser University ↩

3. Canada is a supercomputer laggard and that needs to change | Financial Post ↩

4. Staff | Digital Research Alliance of Canada ↩