The federal and provincial governments of Canada will invest CA$16.4m (US$12m) in Arbutus Research Cloud for its supercomputer infrastructure.

Hosted by the University of Victoria, Arbutus Research Cloud is Canada’s largest cloud computing site for academic research. The company said it supports more than 1,000 research teams across Canada and more than three million end-users worldwide.

The investment will improve how scientists process and share data, the company said.

Arbutus Research Cloud was first developed in 2015. Its website describes it as an OpenStack cloud, providing Infrastructure-as-a-Service resources for researchers, with an emphasis on support for storing and sharing or distributing large data sets. It is said to provide many “petabytes of data storage, thousands of CPUs, hundreds of GPUs, and high-speed research network connectivity to the Canadian research community.”

Prior to the investment, Arbutus was made up of Intel Xeon Gold 6248 processors and E5-2680 v4 CPUs. The University has not shared what sort of hardware the upgrade will include.

“Cloud computing accelerates the speed of research and streamlines collaboration across countries and continents,” said Lisa Kalynchuk, vice president of research and innovation at the University of Victoria.

She added: “We’re very grateful for this investment, which will support both fundamental science and applied research discoveries that impact our everyday lives - from unlocking secrets of the brain, to understanding the cosmos, to modeling solutions for a healthier, more sustainable future.”

The upgrade will also enable the supercomputers to operate more efficiently by being cooled with a water-based system, instead of air. The excess warm water can be repurposed to supply heating, thus contributing to the university’s goal of becoming a climate-positive campus by 2050.

“Advanced research computing is a vital tool in the Digital Research Infrastructure Strategy,” said Francois-Philippe Champagne, Canada's federal Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry. “Today’s announcement will help ensure the researchers are better equipped to optimize research data to generate cutting-edge knowledge and ideas. Expanding the capacity of Canadian supercomputing power ensures that Canada maintains its science and research excellence and remains globally competitive.”

Earlier this week, Simon Fraser University (SFU) in British Columbia, Canada, received CA$80 million ($58.6m) in funding to build a new supercomputer at its Cedar National Host Site.