Imagine a Computer hundreds of times faster and more powerful than the best desktop PC on the market.  Now imagine many of these computers linked together to essentially create one large supercomputer….pretty impressive right?  That is the reality of High Power Computing,  that is the reality of ACEnet.

The Atlantic Computational Excellence network (ACEnet) is a world class High Power Computing (HPC) resource, driving and fostering research, innovation and progress throughout Atlantic Canada.

ACEnet operates as a partnership between ten institutions throughout the Atlantic Provinces, and bridges the geographical gap between our bodies of researchers.  ACEnet currently maintains a hardware infrastructure at 7 of the partnering institutions, Memorial University, University of New Brunswick – Moncton, University of New Brunswick – Fredericton, St. Marys University, St. Francis Xavier University, Dalhousie University, and Mount Allison University.  ACEnets hardware totals just over 3000 processing cores, Terabytes of storage capacity, and hundreds of gigabytes of available memory,  full details and technical specifications of ACEnets hardware and resources can be found on the hardware/resources page. Members and users of ACEnet have complete access to its resources throughout Atlantic Canada.

The hardware infrastructure is connected by several Optical Regional Advanced Networks(ORAN’s) including ACORN-NL, ACORN-NS, and…….. with links of various speeds up to 10 gigabits/second.  The backbone of the network is the CA*net 4 connection, maintained by CANARIE and the Government of Canada, which provides a dedicated 10 gigabit connection into each province.

Why is HPC important?

As the world evolves, our personal and industrial needs become increasingly technological and complex.   In order to grow and progress, the world of research and innovation must also become increasingly more complex.  World-Class researchers perform extremely complex calculations and sophisticated modeling applications based on massive amounts of data.  Because of this, research has began to rely on HPC for two reasons:  Access to these large amounts of data, often from International sources; And the pure computing power which allows a calculation which would take years on a regular PC to be completed in days.