ACADEMIA

Ontario and IBM Canada are partnering with several leading Ontario universities to create a new $210 million world-class virtual Research and Development Centre in Ontario.

IBM will invest up to $175 million through December 2014 in the project, forming the “IBM Canada Research and Development Centre” to serve as a foundation for the research initiative. The Government of Ontario is investing $15 million towards the creation of this Centre; ensuring that the skills needed for developing future information and communications technology products and services are fostered in Ontario, new and existing Ontario companies are leaders in their fields, and innovation efficiencies and cost-savings are created across multiple sectors.

The Government of Canada will contribute $20 million to allow a consortium of seven southern Ontario post-secondary institutions and IBM to install two high-performance IBM Blue Gene/Q supercomputers and develop a cloud computing and agile computing platform to underpin the initiative’s research collaboration. The university consortium will have access to a new Barrie, Ontario based IBM data centre, which will be fully operational in the fall of 2012. Other Canadian researchers and small to medium-sized enterprises will also be invited to join the consortium.

The new IBM Canada Research and Development Centre will use state-of-the-art computer infrastructure to drive innovative discoveries in key areas and bring them to market. The Centre’s research will focus on:

• Data management for health care, such as technology that can help doctors detect life threatening conditions in premature babies 24 hours earlier
• Water conservation and management, such as reducing pollution in water systems by monitoring sewer systems and spotting problems in a pipeline before a leak
• Energy management, such as finding better ways to track how hydro flows, reducing waste and saving customers money, and
• Rapid urbanization and aging infrastructure in our cities, such as managing traffic lights to improve traffic flow.

The research projects will be supported by an expansion of IBM’s software development labs in Markham and Ottawa, and the new high performance data centre in Barrie.