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

The combined investment includes CA$41 million ($30m) from the Digital Research Alliance of Canada and CA$25 million ($18m) from the Province of British Columbia, via the B.C. Knowledge Development Fund. An additional CA$15 million ($11m) was put forward by partners of the university.

SFU said the investment will allow it to replace and upgrade its existing Cedar supercomputer, which is nearing the end of its life. The current system is comprised of 100,400 CPU cores and was built using Xeon Silver 4216 16C 2.1GHz processors, in addition to an Intel Omni-Path interconnect and 526TB of storage.

Cedar was ranked 260 on the most recent Top500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers, with a theoretical peak performance of 3.37 petaflops.

No information about the specifications of the upgraded machine has been released but in a statement, SFU said the new system will “match or exceed Cedar’s current storage capacity and computing performance.”

Dugan O’Neil, SFU vice-president of research and innovation said: "This significant support for the supercomputing facility at SFU ensures that thousands of researchers across academia, government, and industry have the computing power to achieve transformational innovations.”

He added: “From vital discoveries in healthcare to advancements in clean technologies and artificial intelligence, today’s investment will benefit Canadians and the economy now and into the future.”