VAST Data Selected to Power New Wave of GPU-Accelerated Research and Sovereign Cloud Innovation Across Canada
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Author of the article:You can save this article by registering for free here. Or sign-in if you have an account.Canadian national host sites, SciNet and SHARCNET standardize on the VAST AI Operating System as demand for GPU-powered research and AI workloads surges across CanadaSubscribe now to read the latest news in your city and across Canada.Subscribe now to read the latest news in your city and across Canada.Create an account or sign in to continue with your reading experience.Create an account or sign in to continue with your reading experience.Remote-First-Company | NEW YORK CITY, Dec. 18, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — VAST Data, the AI Operating System company, today announced accelerating momentum across Canada as leading national research centers and AI institutes standardize on the VAST AI Operating System (AI OS). SciNet at the University of Toronto, and SHARCNET at the University of Waterloo have adopted VAST as their data and AI operating system, building on previously announced deployments with Canadian-based infrastructure providers that are using VAST to power large-scale GPU services.Together, these organizations represent a cross-section of Canada’s AI ecosystem – from national academic compute sites and world-renowned AI research institutes to cloud infrastructure providers – converging on a common requirement: a scalable, resilient data and AI operating system that can keep pace with GPU-era workloads while remaining simple enough to operate with lean teams.Get the latest headlines, breaking news and columns.By signing up you consent to receive the above newsletter from Postmedia Network Inc.A welcome email is on its way. If you don't see it, please check your junk folder.The next issue of Top Stories will soon be in your inbox.We encountered an issue signing you up. Please try againInterested in more newsletters? Browse here.SciNet, one of Canada’s five national academic HPC sites and home to the Trillium supercomputer, is running its third-generation system with approximately 240,000 CPU cores and 250 GPUs. Rather than repeat a legacy model, SciNet has consolidated on the VAST AI OS infrastructure, designed to serve traditional HPC codes and emerging AI workloads side by side.“We run an extraordinary mix of workloads by researchers across Canada, and our new system pushes well beyond the scale of our previous generation,” said Daniel Gruner, CTO, SciNet. “With VAST, we no longer have to juggle different storage tiers or bolt on burst buffers just to keep up with demanding I/O. We can support both traditional HPC and new AI workloads on VAST’s AI OS that our users hammer every day – and it simply keeps up.”SHARCNET, another of Canada’s national host sites and the organization behind the new Nibi cluster at the University of Waterloo, has similarly chosen the VAST AI OS as the data foundation for its refreshed infrastructure. Nibi combines more than 135,000 CPU cores with 288 GPUs and advanced immersion cooling, and serves a “long tail” of research disciplines – from bioinformatics and physics to economics and the humanities.“We support thousands of researchers with wildly different I/O patterns, from billion-file bioinformatics datasets to students learning HPC for the first time,” said John Morton, Director of Technology, SHARCNET. “With our previous system, a single misbehaving job could impact the entire cluster. The best thing we can say about VAST is that it has largely disappeared into the background – it has quietly absorbed billions of files and some extremely demanding workloads without ever becoming a problem we have to debug.”VAST AI OS allows Canada’s national host sites and AI clouds to: “Canada has made bold, strategic investments in AI – from national research centers to cloud infrastructure designed for large-scale GPU computing,” said Pezhman Sharifi, Director at VAST Data Canada Inc. “What unites SciNet, SHARCNET and other Canadian infrastructure partners is a shared need for an operating system that keeps GPUs and researchers fed with data without adding operational complexity. The VAST AI OS delivers a single, global platform for Canada’s innovation economy – from academic labs to production AI services.”Learn more about the VAST’s industry-leading approach to AI infrastructure by registering for VAST Forward.Learn. Connect. Accelerate. Join VAST’s first-ever user conference, VAST Forward, February 24–26, 2026 in Salt Lake City, Utah. Hear from VAST leadership and customer and partner speakers, dive into technical breakouts, get hands-on in expert-led labs, and earn certifications to validate your expertise. Register here.About VAST DataVAST Data is the AI Operating System company – powering the next generation of intelligent systems with a unified software infrastructure stack that was purpose-built to unlock the full potential of AI. The VAST AI OS consolidates foundational data and compute services and agentic execution into one scalable platform, enabling organizations to deploy and facilitate communication between AI agents, reason over real-time data, and automate complex workflows at global scale. Built on VAST’s breakthrough DASE architecture – the world’s first true parallel distributed system architecture that eliminates tradeoffs between performance, scale, simplicity, and resilience – VAST has transformed its modern infrastructure into a global fabric for reasoning AI. Learn more at vastdata.com and follow VAST Data on LinkedIn, YouTube and X.Postmedia is committed to maintaining a lively but civil forum for discussion. Please keep comments relevant and respectful. Comments may take up to an hour to appear on the site. You will receive an email if there is a reply to your comment, an update to a thread you follow or if a user you follow comments. Visit our Community Guidelines for more information.