Shared Hierarchical Academic Computing Network (SHARCNET)

What is SHARCNET?

Sheridan is part of the Shared Hierarchical Academic Research Computing Network (SHARCNET), a consortium of Canadian academic institutions that share a network of high performance computers. With this infrastructure, we enable world-class academic research, exploring how HPC can help solve highly complex problems, perform business critical analyses, or run computationally intensive workloads that are in scale far beyond the tasks that could be achieved on today’s leading desktop systems.

Currently SHARCNET includes 17 universities and colleges from across Ontario and is one of seven HPC consortia in Canada that operates under the umbrella of Compute Canada. Please visit SHARCNET’s official website for the full list of participating institutions and examples of research that SHARCNET supports.

SHARCNET aims to:

• Accelerate computational academic research
• Attract the best students and faculty to our partner institutions by providing cutting-edge expertise and hardware
• Link academic researchers with corporate partners in a search for new business opportunities

What is HPC?

HPC (High Performance Computing) is the use of high-end computing resources (computers, storage, networking and visualization) to help solve highly complex problems, perform business critical analyses, or to run computationally intensive workloads that are in scale far beyond the tasks that could be achieved on today's leading desktop systems.

What is Access Grid?

The Access Grid® is an ensemble of resources including multi-media large-format displays, presentation and interactive environments, and interfaces to grid middleware and to visualization environments. These resources are used to support group-to-group interactions across the grid.