Yesterday, Compute Canada launched its annual Resource Allocation Competitions (RAC), a peer-reviewed process to grant priority access to Compute Canada’s advanced research computing resources.

The process for getting these resources has been restructured. If your research group needs computing or storage resources on Compute Canada systems in 2017, then you will need to understand the renewed process for getting such resources.

Names for various kinds of resource allocations have changed. For instance, what was formally called a RAC application, now is called an application to the RRG competition (“Resources for Research Groups”), and what was formally a default allocation is now RAS (“Rapid Access Service”). New competitions have been added as well, such as the RPP (Research Platforms and Portals) competition. The RAC acronym is now used as an overall term for all of these competitions.

So if you held a RAC allocation in previous years and want to apply for one in 2017, or you were thinking of applying, you likely want an RRG allocation.

On the Compute Canada site, you can find more information on the RGG and RPP, and on the RAS.

To explain these and other changes to the process, on Thursday Oct 13, 2016, from 12 noon to 1:30 pm, there will be an on-line Q&A session. SciNet will broadcast this session in our boardroom, where SciNet analysts will also be present to take questions (note that SciNet has recently moved to the MaRS building).