Names, Terms, and Acronyms

Advanced research computing (ARC) includes (but is not limited to) high performance computing, advanced computing, artificial intelligence, big data, visualization, storage, software, portals, and platforms involved with research at Canadian academic and research institutes.

HPC4Health is a consortium supporting Advanced Research Computing whose members include Ontario hospitals and health research institutions. HPC4Health is a partner of Compute Ontario. URL: http://www.hpcforhealth.ca/

SciNet is supports Advanced Research Computing research in partnership with Compute Ontario, the University of Toronto, and others. URL: https://www.scinethpc.ca/

The Centre for Advanced Computing supports Advanced Computing Research in partnership with Compute Ontario and Queen's University. URL: https://cac.queensu.ca/

Advanced computing utilizes high-performance computing, scientific visualization, data analysis, data science, storage, and/or cloud systems to perform computations.

High-performance computing (HPC) involves using supercomputers, which have specialized computing and networking hardware, to be able to achieve high levels of performance relative to conventional computers.

A compute cluster is a set of computers that inter-operate and function as a single computer system. Programs are executed on compute clusters using scheduling software. Computer clusters typically have high speed interconnections between all computers within the cluster to allow them to communicate with high bandwidth and low latency. The latter is typically very important when single jobs need to make use of more than one compute node.

A compute node is a computer in a compute cluster.

A cluster is a set of computers that inter-operate and function as a single computer system. Normally when one refers to a cluster, one is referring to a compute cluster as opposed to a cluster of computers that is being used to operate a cloud.

ACENET is a consortium of post-secondary institutions in Atlantic Canada serving the computationally intense and large scale data research needs of its researchers. ACENET is a regional partner of the Digital Research Alliance of Canada. URL: https://www.ace-net.ca/