[Ottawa, ON]
CANARIE, a vital component of the digital infrastructure supporting Canada’s research and education sector, today announced the completion of a series of Western Canada upgrades to its ultra high-speed network that expands its capacity from 100 Gigabits per second (Gbps) to 400Gbps.
The CANARIE Network is the backbone of Canada’s National Research and Education Network (NREN), spanning more than 40,000 km across the country and connecting 13 provincial and territorial networks to each other and to more than 100 NRENs worldwide.
The first of the 400Gb upgrades – a western segment that runs from Seattle, Washington through British Columbia, Alberta, and Saskatchewan, to Winnipeg, Manitoba – was completed in May, with the remaining 400Gbps upgrades in central and eastern Canada to Montréal scheduled for completion in 2025.
This upgrade represents a significant and much-needed boost for Canada’s researchers and post-secondary students who depend on sharing and transmitting extremely large datasets of information with colleagues across the country and around the globe. The jump to 400Gbps means that the CANARIE Network will be capable of supporting an ever-increasing scale of data-intensive research collaborations, ensuring Canadian researchers have the critical infrastructure for their research and education needs, including contributions to global experiments like those at Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and Square Kilometre Array (SKA).
In 2023, the CANARIE Network carried over 699 petabytes (PB) – or 5.6 billion gigabits (Gb) – of data. Practically speaking, it would take a person nearly 3,470 years to watch 699PB worth of 4K HD movies, back-to-back.
“Strong digital research infrastructure is the cornerstone of scientific innovation, and our investments in CANARIE’s ultra high-speed network ensure Canadian researchers can compete on the global stage,” says the Honourable François-Philippe Champagne, Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry. “By connecting our brightest minds across the country and around the world, we’re providing the critical tools to transform big data into groundbreaking discoveries. This network upgrade help maintain Canada as a world leader in research, education, and technological advancement.”
“This significant upgrade to the capacity and reliability of the backbone CANARIE Network was made possible with the dedication and collaboration of our regional NREN Partners, our infrastructure partners, and our Network team, says Mark Wolff, CANARIE’s Chief Technology Officer. We’re grateful for the investments from the Government of Canada that funded this upgrade, which will equip Canada’s researchers and students with high performance connectivity to compute, storage, and instruments of science for research, education, and innovation, both in Canada and internationally.”
“This upgrade of the CANARIE Canadian network, along with the previously announced transatlantic link from Canada to Europe, will ensure that researchers on the ATLAS experiment at the CERN Laboratory in Geneva will be able to rapidly access the new data from the upcoming High Luminosity Large Hadron Collider (LHC),” says Dr. Randall Sobie, Principal Research Scientist of the Institute of Particle Physics at the University of Victoria. “The unprecedented capacity of the CANARIE network will allow us to transfer the exabyte-scale data from CERN to Canada and have a leading role in the search for new scientific discoveries.”
For more information, please contact:
Lesley McElroy
Director, Communications
CANARIE
[email protected]