Researchers at the University of Saskatchewan are set to receive significant funding from the provincial government to harness the power of super computers.
The government has committed $2.2 million over five years to Compute Canada. The organization provides advanced computers, support personnel and services to researchers across Saskatchewan.
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The funding will also go toward research at the U of S in multiple areas including global food security and the Canadian Light Source.
“Physics, mathematics, precision Ag, medicine, just about every discipline we have at the U of S can be impacted by this investment,” Kevin Schneider, associate vice-president of research at the U of S, said.
The money is expected to support the implementation of new and improved cyber infrastructure, like super computers.
“With the immense amount of data that’s being produced nowadays, we need computers beyond what we have at our disposal,” Steven Bonk, the minister responsible for innovation, said. “So this funding helps our researchers access supercomputers to allow them to process this data more efficiently.”
The updated infrastructure allows researchers to better store their data and ensure the data is easily accessible in an archive. The university says the hope is it will cover the processing power used to visualize and make sense of data to be used on innovative endeavors.
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The funds will be matched by the Canadian Foundation for Innovation, while the U of S will contribute $1.1 million.
The project is the continuation of a similar project that ran between 2012 and 2017, which provided over 480 researchers from Saskatchewan universities with $4.9 million in funding.