ACENET, Atlantic Canada’s Own R&D Supercomputing Resource – Digital Nova Scotia – Leading Digital Industry
ACENET, Atlantic Canada’s Own R&D Supercomputing Resource

February 17, 2021

Supporting companies to take on R&D challenges that would be impossible on traditional desktops, DNS member ACENET offers access to supercomputing resources, expertise, training and support for large- scale analysis and modelling across a wide range of applications. They offer a unique blend of local support, specialists and skills development to allow companies to leverage the advantages of high-performance computing.

Some examples of applications they support include;

  • Machine learning and artificial intelligence
  • Atomic and molecular simulations
  • Drug & material design
  • Bioinformatics
  • Medical imaging,
  • CFD and FEA
  • Earth and ocean modelling
  • Data processing & visualization

Proudly Supporting Atlantic Canadians

ACENET was created in 2005 to serve the needs of academic researchers in Atlantic Canada. Today they serve over 1000 researchers and their teams in the region. Through a partnership with ACOA, they’ve acquired supercomputing infrastructure focused on supporting industry innovation in Atlantic Canada. ACENET is a not-for-profit and works with clients who don’t want to invest in and manage complex infrastructure, who may find navigating big commercial cloud services complicated and expensive, who want to develop their in-house skills, and who appreciate having a local team of technical experts invested in their success.

Their people are the heart of their organization. They have a unique combination of advanced degrees in physics and applied sciences, research experience, and years of technical experience using, teaching and supporting advanced digital tools. ACENET is a not-for-profit organization, whose aim is to provide the power of advanced computing tools to increase the competitive advantage of the industry in Atlantic Canada.

Leveraging their Clients through Unprecedented times

ACENET recognizes that Atlantic Canada’s success in managing COVID-19 has demonstrated the power of this region’s culture of collaboration and mutual support. Their team looks forward to building on this momentum and playing their part as a collaborative regional resource committed to helping their clients discover the power of supercomputing and helping their clients develop the skills to make the most of it. Watching their R&D take off as a result is incredibly rewarding for them.

“We’ve been very fortunate at ACENET to have a distributed workforce that is used to working remotely with both one another and with our network of partners across the country,” says Michele Fash, Director of Business Development. “We’ve seen two repercussions of COVID-19 in our organization. First has been the increased use of our resources, as projects unable to continue work requiring physical presence in labs have shifted to digital modelling they can accomplish remotely. Second, with local restrictions, we needed to move all of our training from face-to-face to online. Though a challenge to make this shift so quickly and completely, it has significantly increased the reach of our training services.”

ACENET goes the extra mile to help their clients succeed. They offer training from novice to advanced levels, through both scheduled events and custom training for groups. They teach people who have never used supercomputing how to get up and running. They also teach various programming languages, software packages and revision/control systems, introductory machine learning, data management and cybersecurity to name a few. ACENET also offers a four-day school in parallel computing every spring.

Explore ACENET’s full training offering here.

Visit ACENET