What You Can Do with 16 Free vCPUs
A year of free cloud compute for Canadian researchers
The free.xlarge instance on myresearchcloud.ca includes:
16 vCPUs
64 GB of memory
128 GB P-SSD (ephemeral, non-HA)
800 GB of S3 storage (50 GB per vCPU)
These allocations are free for one year, providing Canadian researchers with substantial compute power normally out of reach without expensive cloud credits. Additional storage is available at nonprofit academic rates.
Workloads That Fit Well on 16 vCPUs
With 16 vCPUs, 64 GB of RAM, and nearly a terabyte of storage, this tier supports advanced, multi-threaded, and memory-intensive workloads, such as:
Large-scale genomics
Run whole genome variant calling, de novo assemblies, or population-level sequencing datasets.
Climate & environmental modelling
Perform high-resolution climate simulations, hydrological models, or multi-step environmental prediction pipelines.
Advanced physics & chemistry simulations
Execute quantum chemistry calculations, molecular dynamics, or Monte Carlo simulations requiring parallel cores.
AI training & multi-step ML pipelines
Train medium-sized transformer models, large CNNs, or prepare multi-GPU ready workflows when paired with fractional GPUs.
Science Gateways at scale
Support multi-user community platforms for genomics, physics, or digital humanities.
Cross-disciplinary data processing
Handle graph analytics, social network analysis, or NLP across large corpora.
Why This Matters
The 16 vCPU tier represents serious research capacity — still free for a year. It empowers labs and teams to run workloads that would otherwise require competitive national allocations or costly hyperscaler credits. By providing this level of compute at no cost, myresearchcloud.ca removes bottlenecks and accelerates Canadian research from idea to publication.
When to Scale Up
The 16 vCPU tier covers the largest free allocation available. If your project requires more compute, sustained capacity, or specialized GPUs, you’ll need to transition into the Affordable Research Cloud (Academic & Nonprofit) tier.
This paid tier provides:
Priority access at 40–50% below hyperscaler rates
Options for multi-node scaling
Advanced GPUs and larger memory footprints
Multi-server clusters
Petascale and above storage
When requesting larger allocations, please include details on:
Scientific or AI workload (e.g., genome sequencing at scale, climate simulations, transformer pretraining)
Resources required (cores, GPUs, memory, storage)
Anticipated outcomes (papers, datasets, tools, community resources)
We’ll help you right-size your allocation to match your workload.
Get Started
Apply today for your free 16 vCPU instance and start running research workloads within days and run advanced research workloads at no cost for a year.