ACENET is a not-for-profit whose aim is to provide the power of advanced computing tools to increase the competitive advantage of industry in Atlantic Canada.

Do you want to move faster from concept to execution?

Do you need more compute power, storage or memory than your desktop can handle, either constantly or occasionally?

Are you unsure which computing methods will work best for you?

Use the power of ACENET for large-scale analysis and modelling across a wide range of applications, among them:

• machine learning and artificial intelligence
• large data processing
• data visualization
• CFD and FEA
• atomic and molecular simulations
• materials design
• drug design
• bioinformatics
• medical imaging
• and more!

With ACENET, your data stays in Canada, we have no interest in your intellectual property, and we don’t look at, touch or use your data for any purpose whatsoever.

We work with clients who don’t want to invest in and manage complex infrastructure, who may find navigating commercial cloud services complicated, who want to develop their in-house skills, or who appreciate having a local team of technical experts invested in their success.

Installed in late 2019, ACENET’s Siku (meaning “sea ice” in Inuktitut) cluster was funded in large part by the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency (ACOA) with the intention of generating regional economic benefits through its priority of industry engagement, while still recognizing the important work that ACENET does for academic research in the region. The system is to be used in a manner which leads it to be financially self-sustaining under a not-for-profit organization model.

The system is located at Memorial University and is a 2300 core computing cluster that incorporates Intel Cascade Lake CPUs, a high-throughput, low-latency EDR Infiniband interconnect, AI-capable NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs, a 1.5 PB parallel filesystem, tape back-up, and offers both batch and cloud-computing interfaces.

• We provide monthly usage report to keep you informed.
• We bill quarterly for actual usage.
• You can set quarterly usage caps to protect you against unintended overages.

Meet Siku.

Our local support team is at the heart of our organization, with its unique combination of advanced degrees in physical and applied sciences, research experience, and years of technical experience using, teaching and supporting advanced digital tools.

They are positioned across Atlantic Canada, giving you ready access to local support with a vested interest in the success of Atlantic Canadian industry.

Available in-person, by phone, email, video conferencing, and through a dedicated help desk, they can help you:

• Determine the most appropriate compute and storage resources
• Obtain an account and get started with the systems
• Move from Windows to Linux
• Install, debug, and configure your software and plugins
• Optimize, design, configure, parallelize, and troubleshoot your code for use on a high performance computing system
• Migrate your data and set up analyses
• Optimize your efficiency by teaching  you how to manage schedulers
• For cloud: help set up a virtual machine (VM), install plugins and software, apply patches, migrate data, build portals and develop back-end tools
• With in-depth collaboration to solve challenging issues
• Through ongoing support

Among our team are specialists in:

• High Performance Computing (HPC)
• Cloud
• Big data and data analytics
• CFD
• Machine learning and artificial intelligence
• Molecular dynamics
• Computational chemistry
• Cybersecurity
• 3D visualization
• Data planning and management

Our in-house cybersecurity team ensures that ACENET follows leading practices and protocols to secure your data. They are also available to consult with you.

Summary of Cybersecurity Policies

Data Security Policy

ACENET has almost 20 years of experience hosting, managing and operating advanced computing systems. That’s experience we can bring to you.

If you’re considering purchasing your own server as part of a government funding proposal, we may be able to help with the needs assessment, system design, budgeting, and technical section of the proposal, as well as hosting, managing, operating and maintaining the equipment. We have the ability to ‘contribute’ systems to our current infrastructure. This could save you both money and time.

• Your dollars would be dedicated to maximizing compute or storage capacity, as we already have key infrastructure pieces in place.
• You would be able to burst beyond your purchased capacity in times of need in order to access the remaining Siku system.
• You would not need to engage or deploy a systems administrator, as we have technical staff with the required expertise.
• You would be able to leverage the computing environment, software stack, monitoring, reporting and cybersecurity aspects of the Siku system.
• It would reduce idle capacity on the system, as other users would be able to pick up your unused cycles, thus maximizing the public dollar investment and strengthening your case to the funding agency.

Free Trial 

Why take our word for it? We encourage you to try out Siku to see if it fits with your R&D program through a free trial. The trial provides 3 months or 2000 compute hours (or 60 GPU hours), whichever comes first, along with 1 TB of storage. Email industry@ace-net.ca for details.

Jump Start for Start-ups

We are also eager to support our Atlantic Canadian startup community. If you are a registered member of an incubator or accelerator organization, you are invited to participate in our Jump Start for Start-ups program. Through Jump Start, companies can access 10,000 compute hours (of 285 GPU hours), 20 hours of technical consulting over 12 months, along with 6 months of free access to any of ACENET's scheduled training sessions - a total value of $5000! Just email industry@ace-net.ca for details and registration.

Our training includes novice to advanced levels, both scheduled events and custom training for groups, and online and in-person.

We teach people who’ve never used advanced computing tools how to get up and running. Some people who take our courses have never worked with the command line. We teach a two-day R&D computing bootcamp using either Unix or R. We also offer a four-day school in parallel computing every spring. 

A variety of topics are available, including a range of programming languages, software packages and revision/control systems, introductory machine learning, data management and cybersecurity - to name a few.

Many of our courses have slide decks and videos available, and we have an extensive Wiki.