What You Can Do with 2 Free vCPUs
A year of free cloud compute for Canadian researchers
The free.small instance on myresearchcloud.ca includes:
2 vCPUs
8 GB of memory
16 GB P-SSD (ephemeral, non-HA)
100 GB of S3 storage
Allocations are free for one year, giving Canadian researchers, students, and citizen scientists an opportunity to explore, test, and publish without worrying about cost. Additional storage is available at nonprofit academic rates.
Workloads That Fit Well on 2 vCPUs
2 vCPUs might sound small, but they’re surprisingly capable when paired with 8 GB of RAM and 100 GB of storage:
Data science notebooks
Run Jupyter Notebook or RStudio for cleaning datasets, running regressions, or exploring visualizations.
Genomics starter jobs
Perform BLAST sequence alignments, gene annotation lookups, and other lightly parallelized bioinformatics tasks.
Citizen science projects
Analyze climate data, explore astronomy datasets, or work in digital humanities with open datasets.
Machine learning exploration
Train scikit-learn models, experiment with decision trees, or run small TensorFlow/PyTorch prototypes.
Software development & testing
Build and test open-source projects in a reproducible Linux environment, with free storage for code and datasets.
Why This Matters
Many Canadian researchers face allocation shortages through national programs, while commercial cloud providers are often too costly for exploratory work. The 2 vCPU free tier ensures that even early-stage projects, citizen scientists, and students can get started right away — no grant, no credit card required.
When to Scale Up
If your project outgrows 2 vCPUs, you can request to scale up to 4, 8, or 16 vCPUs. Allocations are reviewed on request and subject to availability, following FAIR allocation principles to ensure equitable access across disciplines.
When requesting a scale-up, include:
Workload or application (e.g., genomics pipeline, ML training, climate model)
Resources required (vCPUs, memory, storage, GPU if applicable)
Expected outcomes (e.g., publications, datasets, community contributions)
For guaranteed capacity or larger sustained workloads, the Affordable Research Cloud (Academic & Nonprofit) tier offers priority access at discounted rates, with additional storage at academic pricing.
Get Started
Apply today for your free 2 vCPU instance and start running research workloads within days.