ACENET’s team of System Administrators and Digital Research Consultants provide expertise, help and training to you for the duration of your project.

We have technical staff based in Halifax, St. John’s, Fredericton, Charlottetown and Antigonish, with the capacity to send expert help where it’s needed. While loosely responsible for the geographic area in which they’re situated, ACENET’s support team leverage their diverse individual skill sets, delivering the specific expertise required, regardless of location.

In addition to their expertise in supercomputing, most of ACENET’s Research Consultants have advanced degrees in a variety of scientific fields. It’s a powerful combination that bridges technology and research. Our clients appreciate the innovative solutions that stem from ACENET’s team-based approach to solving challenging issues.

• 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
• Through ongoing support

Among our team are specialists in:

• Artificial Intelligence
• Big data and data analytics
• Cloud
• Data management and planning
• Humanities and Social Sciences
• Bioinformatics
• Engineering
• Molecular Dynamics
• Cybersecurity

In addition, our partnership in the Digital Research Alliance of Canada federation provides clients with access to over 100 technical experts located across the country, enabling us to tackle just about any problem. 

Contact us about your project.

The Embedded Technical Support program helps researchers in any discipline at Atlantic Canadian post-secondary institutions to adopt or improve their use of advanced computing techniques and resources in their research. 

The program pairs our technical experts with innovative projects that have high potential for success and impact, and that require advanced computing resources, programming support and/or in-depth technical expertise. Some examples of areas we can help include: code parallelization, profiling and optimization for HPC systems; scientific or data visualization; data analytics; machine learning; workflow migration from the desktop to a cluster; research portal creation on a cloud platform; and incorporation of advanced computing into research programs.

Successful projects under this program are able to access focused and dedicated support from one to two of ACENET’s research consultants for a period of two to four months. During this period, the ACENET staff member will spend up to 50% of their time working on the project.

The most recent call closed 18 May, 2025. 

For more information, contact applications@ace-net.ca

Details & Apply

Projects supported

Moulay Akloufi, Université de Moncton, Ovarian Cancer Subtype Classification and Outlier Detection

Annabel Cohen, University of PEI, Using ACENET to Host Psychology Experiments with an Associated Data Management System

Marcia English, St. FX University, Food Matrix Interactions with Small Molecules 

Victor Martinez, Dalhousie University /Isaak Walter Killam Hospital for Children, Leveraging DRAC's resources for clinical implementation of novel sequencing technologies

Dr. Om Rajora, UNB, Development of Reference Transcriptome, and Identification and Characterization of Differentially Expressed Genes and Pathways in Response to Climate Change Conditions in Black Spruce

ACENET has almost 20 years experience hosting, managing and operating supercomputing 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 by incorporating it into our Atlantic regional system, Siku.  This could save you both money and time. 

• Your dollars could be dedicated to maximizing compute/storage capacity, as we already have key infrastructure pieces in place. 
• It would enable you to burst beyond your purchased capacity in times of need to access the rest of Siku.  
• 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 these cycles, thus maximizing the public dollar investment and strengthening your case to the funding agency.

To learn more about ACENET hosting your grant-funded infrastructure, review our guidelines.

If you would like to incorporate supercomputing into one of your courses but don't have sufficient compute resources, you can reserve an ACENET training cluster by completing this form.