ACIC
ACIC develops and operates its own simulation software and high-performance computing infrastructure. The tools described here are used in — and in some cases were created for — our DRDC research program.
EXN/Aero is a general-purpose computational fluid dynamics solver developed in-house at ACIC, built from the ground up for manycore CPU and GPU architectures. It is implemented using CUDA, OpenMP, and MPI, enabling it to run efficiently on a range of hardware from single workstations to multi-GPU HPC clusters.
The solver was developed in collaboration with DRDC and Envenio to undertake a wide range of submarine CFD research projects at increasingly resolved mesh and time settings.
Stage² is ACIC's workflow orchestration platform for scientific computing. It manages the movement of data and computation across edge devices, local HPC clusters, and cloud infrastructure — making it possible to run complex, multi-stage simulation pipelines without manually managing the transitions between computing environments.
Stage² is the foundation of the SpatialOne platform and is actively used in ACIC research and industry projects. It supports integration with AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, as well as national HPC resources through Compute Canada and ACENET.
ACIC operates its own in-house high-performance computing infrastructure, providing dedicated GPU compute capacity for research that requires long-running, large-scale simulations.
| System | Hardware | Active Period |
|---|---|---|
| Mach1 | NVIDIA K80 GPU cluster | 2012–2018 |
| Mach2 | NVIDIA V100 GPU cluster | 2019–2026 |
| Mach3 | NVIDIA GB-series cluster | 2026– (in development) |
In addition to in-house resources, ACIC has access to national compute allocation through the Digital Research Alliance of Canada (DRAC), and uses cloud infrastructure through AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud for appropriate workloads.
