Facilities at the IRMACS Centre
The IRMACS Centre is a beautiful 25,000 square foot, flexible, collaborative, computationally sophisticated research, meeting and conferencing environment. IRMACS meeting room facilities range from a state-of-the-art 100 seat Presentation Studio, through to a technically sophisticated Boardroom, to a range of meeting rooms (10908, 10940, 10917.2) and breakout rooms. Distinctive to IRMACS are the lab space, the visualization lab, and the supporting infrastructure and staff.
The unique IRMACS floor plan and architecture is deliberately designed to facilitate interaction, while still providing an intimate and productive working environment. IRMACS' flexibility supports and encourages typical use (conferences and workshops, meetings, colloquiums, seminars, and social functions) and novel use (such as the successful Coast to Coast seminar series, interdisciplinary training events for students from across Canada, multi-site global thesis defenses, and theatre / dance productions).
Who can use the IRMACS Centre's Facilities?
Consider hosting your next event at IRMACS.
- Research Project Members have full access to the facility infrastructure - learn more about hosting a project and IRMACS membership.
- SFU Administrative Units may take advantage of the facility's technical infrastructure and support for a modest cost recovery fee. For more details, please contact the IRMACS Centre.
- Non SFU External Users may access the IRMACS facilities; refer to the IRMACS lab and theatre/meeting room descriptions to choose a meeting space, view the information for rates and booking policies, and then contact the IRMACS Centre to make a booking.
- Visiting Researchers have access to the facilities - learn more about visiting IRMACS.
The Lab Space
The IRMACS lab space is architecturally designed to attract researchers, providing a quiet, yet dynamic research lab space for interdisciplinary research. Co-habitation of research groups, based on common research interests rather than research discipline boundaries is encouraged both socially, technically, and administratively. The goal is to foster serendipitous research collaborations among IRMACS researchers at all levels.
Visualization Lab
IRMACS, in collaboration with WestGrid, has created a visualization lab for researchers at SFU. This lab is targeted at those users who require visualization at a scale that is beyond what they can achieve on their own desktop or within their own laboratories but do not require the level of capability provided by the Presentation Studio. The IRMACS visualization lab contains a high-resolution 30" LCD display (Apple Cinema Display at 2560x1600 pixels) for high resolution visualization, a lab-scale immersive 3D visualization system (passive stereo CyViz Viz3D system), and a 3x2 tiled LCD display (3840x2048 pixels). These systems target the day-to-day visualization needs of IRMACS researchers that go beyond desktop visualization. For more information, please see the Visualization Infrastructure section of the web site.
Supporting Infrastructure
The technological infrastructure deployed throughout the IRMACS Centre has been designed to be easy to use. From plasma computer displays with touch-screen interfaces to sophisticated computational cluster, remote collaboration and visualization technologies, IRMACS creates a highly interactive environment. Behind the scenes are expert technical support staff to assist in every situation.
