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Simon Fraser University’s Cedar Supercomputer

How the Canadian unversity uses its Cedar supercomputer.

With more than 3.6 petaFLOPS of computing power, Cedar and its network will allow thousands of researchers from British Columbia and across Canada to collect, analyze, share and store immense volumes of data.

Simon Fraser University (SFU) has campuses in Vancouver, Burnaby and Surrey, British Columbia. It consistently ranks among Canada’s top universities in research impact.

In April 2017, SFU launched Canada’s most powerful academic supercomputer. It was named “Cedar” after British Columbia’s official tree.
With more than 3.6 petaFLOPS of computing power, Cedar and its network will allow thousands of researchers from British Columbia and across Canada to collect, analyze, share and store immense volumes of data.

The supercomputer builds on SFU’s growing strength in big data. Unlike many HPC systems designed for narrowly targeted applications, Cedar is designed to run a variety of scientific workloads, including those related to personalized medicine, green energy technology, artificial intelligence (AI) and the AI sub-fields of machine learning and deep learning.

The system, sold and supported by Scalar Decisions Inc., includes:

  • 902 Dell EMC™ PowerEdge™ C4130 and C6320 servers,
  • 27,696 Intel® Xeon® Processor cores for computation,
  • An Intel® Omni-Path Architecture (Intel® OPA) next-generation fabric, and
  • 11.4 petabytes of storage.

Learn more: A Super Cedar case study.

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