Supercomputer Cedar
SFU's Supercomputer Cedar is one of the most powerful academic supercomputers in Canada. Cedar provides the scale and capacity that is paving the way for new research breakthroughs.
Supercomputer Cedar
As the future of research moves to agile prototyping and integrating data science approaches across the spectrum of research, SFU has world leading expertise to guide researchers on their big data journey by using Supercomputer Cedar.
High Performance Computing (HPC)—also known as supercomputing—empowers Canadian researchers to tackle large, difficult problems and conduct research investigations as it dramatically speeds up research, offering processing speeds thousands of times faster than a traditional desktop.
Most research today is data intensive, whether it is genomics, advanced materials, or humanities and social sciences. SFU’s supercomputer Cedar serves a diverse range of research projects and enables discoveries that previously may not have been possible because the tools were simply not there.
SFU computing science professor Jian Pei works with Supercomputer Cedar to do research for good. His research focuses on data mining and ensuring it is produced, shared and used in an effective, efficient, fair and ethical manner to create positive change in our lives.
Canada's supercomputer infrastructure
Supercomputer Cedar provides the computing power Canadian researchers need to achieve transformational innovations that directly benefit Canadians. Just some of these include personalized medicine for better patient care, green technologies to help fight climate change and artificial intelligence research that will contribute to the Canadian economy.
Cedar is one of five national systems that make up Canada’s Digital Research Infrastructure. Under the stewardship of the Digital Research Alliance of Canada, Cedar was deployed as part of one of the biggest advanced research computing renewals in Canada’s history.
Why is SFU's supercomputer named Cedar?
Cedar references the Western Red Cedar, British Columbia’s official tree, and is of great spiritual significance to First Nations. The cedar tree also symbolizes inspiration and can represent data structures.
SFU stories about Cedar
Empowering personalized care: Cancer treatment to benefit from AI-driven imaging platform (SFU News, September 7, 2023)
Specifications
Cedar provides expanded compute, storage and cloud resources for researchers across the country. With our regional partners, Digital Research Alliance of Canada serves over 11,000 Canadian researchers, including more than 3,000 faculty members across all academic disciplines.
See the list of Supercomputer Cedar's specifications.
Contact
James Peltier
Director, Research Computing, HPC
james_peltier@sfu.ca
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