Two decades after hiring its first employees, ACENET has become a major player in the research ecosystem in Atlantic Canada.
ACENET is a not-for-profit consortium of universities and community colleges in Atlantic Canada offering advanced research computing resources for academia and industry.
Memorial University is the lead institution and head office.
Over the last two decades, ACENET has grown from five universities to include 15 institutional members and 23 employees.
It has served more than 4,000 clients and trained nearly 14,000 researchers and students at no charge.
Dr. Tana Allen, vice-president (research) at Memorial, is the chair of its board of directors.
“The hallmark of our success lies in our culture of teamwork, evident within our own team and in the way we approach our clients, stakeholders, investors, other regional organizations and national-level teams,” Dr. Allen and Greg Lukeman, ACENET’s chief executive officer (CEO), wrote in the organization’s latest annual report.
Range of services
ACENET offers unique capabilities in the region.
Its supercomputers integrate the power of thousands of CPUs into a single system.
“We’re able to amplify each voice by working together rather than competing for resources.”
Supercomputers can do highly complex calculations not possible on a laptop, work with very large and varied datasets, host a cloud-based platform and store and transfer massive data files, enabling breakthroughs in fields such as climate modelling, genomic research, astrophysics, humanities and artificial intelligence.
ACENET’s technical staff, research consultants, trainers and systems administrators have contributed to the growth of the organization.
At any given week throughout the year, ACENET hosts a wide range of workshops for researchers across all disciplines on topics such as high-performance computing, artificial intelligence, programming, cloud and data management and more.
‘Breadth of disciplines’
Mr. Lukeman is passionate about leading the small but mighty organization.
Before being named CEO in 2019, he served as chief technology officer since 2005, where he guided the growth of the consortium, its technical group and computing resources.
“What makes this job so fulfilling is the diverse mix of research we get to witness and impact,” he said. “Of course, supporting research across such a breadth of disciplines requires a diverse support team. Absent ACENET, individual institutions would not be able to assemble a support team with such a wide range of skills and experience.”
Regional collaboration has proven to be a major benefit for ACENET.
Over the years, it has worked with researchers on nearly 30 projects to integrate infrastructure funded by its grants into ACENET’s systems — hardware worth $6.7 million.
“Many of our consortium members are smaller institutions, which means we’re able to amplify each voice by working together rather than competing for resources,” said Dr. Allen. “ACENET has, I think, been a model organization to assist and develop the region. I have very good feelings about the next 20 years of ACENET, but it will look completely different from 2024 because ACENET is able to be responsive.”
Did you know?
Did you know members of the Memorial research community can participate in webinars and training sessions organized and hosted by ACENET?
Check out what’s happening here.
ACENET is also a regional partner of the Digital Research Alliance of Canada.
Services from both organizations are offered free to academic researchers and their groups.
Any academic researcher from a Canadian post-secondary research institution, or those collaborating on Canadian research projects, who need access to supercomputing resources to support their research may register for an Alliance account.
Learn more about research at Memorial and check out Research Strategy 2023-28 to learn how we’re moving ideas forward.
