Arbutus Research Cloud

Researchers at UVic and across Canada are building and using new tools to measure, simulate, and predict the world around us. With these advances, the computational and data-related demands for research programs are growing rapidly.

What is Arbutus Research Cloud?

Hosted by the University of Victoria, Arbutus is Canada's largest cloud computing site for academic research. Researchers nationwide can use the powerful cloud system to process, share and store their data.

Governed by the Digital Research Alliance of Canada (the Alliance) it is one of the Alliance's five national host sites for advanced research computing and provides a unique offering in the Canadian research landscape as the only site dedicated to cloud resources.

It was first deployed in 2015 and is undergoing a renewal process, with a portion of the $228.3 million funded by Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada for the 2023-25 period for digital research infrastructure (DRI) initiatives.

What Arbutus Research Cloud can do

Researchers can use Arbutus as a source of on-demand and long-term computational infrastructure. These resources can be set up as virtual machines and managed remotely by the research team. Arbutus’s cloud resources can be set up to support various computing needs. Many research workloads are best suited to running in a cloud environment, due to customization or time-sensitivity needs.

Some examples of researchers using Arbutus are:

Randall Sobie and fellow researchers at the Victoria Subatomic Physics and Accelerator Research Centre use Arbutus Cloud to process vast amounts of data in their quest to understand the fundamental properties of the universe.
Madeleine McPherson leads a national Energy Modelling Hub to test decarbonization scenarios and share information and tools.
Marie-Ève Tremblay uses Arbutus for AI and machine learning to analyze and visualize advanced 3D imaging of the brain.
Xiaodai Dong uses Arbutus Cloud for real-time transmission of mobile electrocardiogram data.

More generally, researchers often use Arbutus for applications like:

Processing, storing, and sharing massive data sets.
Running on-demand computations.
Hosting online research platforms and portals, which can allow users to run calculations or access data through an easy-to-use web interface.

Getting access

Arbutus is available free of charge for faculty members at Canadian institutions, as well as their research team and partners.

We’ve collected some links for interested researchers to learn more and register for access.

Specifications

Arbutus is 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.

Arbutus provides many petabytes of data storage, thousands of CPUs, hundreds of GPUs, and high-speed research network connectivity to the Canadian research community. More information is available at the Alliance wiki.

Support

Arbutus is hosted at the University of Victoria and managed by UVic’s Research Computing Services team, with support from the Digital Research Alliance of Canada and its partners.

If you'd like to learn more about how to get started with Arbutus resources, or whether they’re right for your research project, please contact our team and its partners through Alliance Cloud support.

Email the Alliance Cloud support team