Funding, News and Announcements

It is with great joy this holiday season that ACENET announces the launch of Siku, the Atlantic Canada regional advanced computing system. 

Located at Memorial University, Siku, the Inukitut word for “sea ice”, is state-of-the-art, with a theoretical peak of 100 Tflops. It offers both batch and cloud computing interfaces, deploying 2000 CPU cores, high-throughput, low-latency Infiniband interconnect, AI-capable GPUs, a 1.5 PB high-speed parallel filesystem, and data tape back-up. Siku is 50% more powerful than all of ACENET's recently retired systems, added together. Technical specifications can be viewed here. 

Designed to be interoperable with the national Compute Canada platform, Siku is not intended to replace researcher use of the national infrastructure, but rather to accommodate regional priorities that cannot be well met by these systems. ACENET personnel continue to support researchers in their use of Compute Canada national systems. 

Siku also provides ACENET with the Compute Canada operational base required to host computational infrastructure resulting from Canada Foundation for Innovation awards to Atlantic Canadian researchers (these are often known as contributed systems).

Supported in large part by ACOA, the priority for Siku is to generate regional economic benefits through industry engagement. It fills a void for those companies who can benefit from advanced computing, but who lack affordable access to this scale of resources and specialized technical support. This paid industry use will provide ACENET with the ability to fund Siku's eventual replacement. 

For more information about Siku, please visit the website or contact info@ace-net.ca.