Nibi is the University of Waterloo’s newly refreshed advanced research computing (ARC) system and replaces the Graham supercomputer which was nearing end-of-life use. Nibi provides researchers from across Canada with cost effective, robust compute capacity and high-performance, shared and secure storage to advance groundbreaking research.
The name Nibi was selected in consultation with local Indigenous communities and means water in Anishinaabemowin (Ojibwe). The name refers to Nibi's innovative water-based cooling system that maximizes efficiency and sustainability.
Nibi is green
Nibi harnesses leading-edge technology to reduce cooling costs and utilizes water rather than air resulting in more efficient and sustainable systems for the future. Instead of paying to get rid of heat generated by high-performance computing, the heat is captured and repurposed to heat the Mike and Ophelia Lazaridis Quantum-Nano Centre.
Nibi is powerful
With more than 700 nodes and 140,000 CPU cores, Nibi supports many simultaneous computational jobs. It provides 15 petaFLOPs of peak theoretical computational performance. Nibi provides GPU-equipped nodes each with eight H100 Nvidia GPUs to support large AI models. Nibi has more than 25 Petabytes of purely flash based storage space with increased performance and reliability than previous storage solutions.
Nibi is collaborative
Nibi is one of five National Host Sites for digital research infrastructure (DRI), along with the University of Toronto, McGill University, Simon Fraser University and the University of Victoria. Nibi is also a member of SHARCNET, a multi-university consortium in Ontario. It is projected that Nibi will support more than 4,000 researchers annually and create broadly accessible advanced computing capacity for multiple institutions, including universities and hospitals, across the country.
Nibi is impactful
Since 2017, Waterloo’s supercomputer has been accessed by thousands of researchers from multiple universities to advance innovation in areas from climate change and electric vehicle batteries to AI-driven cancer diagnostics and drug discovery. Research enabled by Nibi and other publicly funded systems generates significant economic impact in the form of job training, patented inventions, high-tech start-ups, and spin-off impacts in local economies. Nibi’s enhanced capacity enables discoveries that can transform science, medicine and technology to tackle Canada’s most pressing challenges while also driving economic development.
Nibi is cost-effective
Ontario’s publicly funded DRI ecosystem provides compute capacity at approximately one-fifth the cost of buying it from commercial cloud providers*, and includes high quality, tailored data and training services that are not available through commercial providers. In 2024-25, these services, amounting to an $80 million value at commercial prices, were provided to 7,750 Ontario researchers at no cost to them.
*Analysis provided by Compute Ontario, using data supplied by Digital Research Alliance of Canada and commercial service providers.
Nibi is funded by Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada through the Digital Research Alliance of Canada, and the Ministry of Colleges, Universities, Research Excellence and Security through Compute Ontario.
Contact
John Morton
Director of Technology, SHARCNET
Technical Lead, Nibi cluster
Email: john@sharcnet.ca