What You Can Do with 4 Free vCPUs

A year of free cloud compute for Canadian researchers

The free.medium instance on myresearchcloud.ca includes:

  • 4 vCPUs

  • 16 GB of memory

  • 32 GB P-SSD (ephemeral, non-HA)

  • 200 GB of S3 storage (50 GB per vCPU)

These allocations are free for up to one year, enabling Canadian researchers, students, and citizen scientists to run more demanding workloads without cost. Additional storage is available at nonprofit academic rates.

Workloads That Fit Well on 4 vCPUs

With 4 vCPUs and 16 GB of RAM, you can handle moderately complex projects and multi-threaded applications, including:

  • Data analysis at scale

    • RStudio or Jupyter with larger datasets, running statistical packages like lme4 or pandas on tens of thousands of rows.

  • Bioinformatics pipelines

    • Execute RNA-seq workflows, genome assembly preprocessing, or parallel BLAST searches.

  • Machine learning prototypes

    • Train and validate small to medium ML models — scikit-learn classifiers, PyTorch CNNs, or NLP prototypes.

  • Simulation workloads

    • Run agent-based models, network simulations, or Monte Carlo runs that need multi-core processing.

  • Team projects

    • Support small lab groups, student teams, or collaborative research projects that need shared, consistent compute.

Why This Matters

The 4 vCPU tier strikes a balance: more power than entry-level instances, yet still free for up to a year. It’s ideal for projects that go beyond exploratory notebooks but don’t yet require production-scale compute — filling a critical gap for Canadian researchers and nonprofits who often lack affordable resources.

When to Scale Up

If your project outgrows 4 vCPUs, you can request to scale up to 8 or 16 vCPUs. Allocations are reviewed on request and subject to available resources, using FAIR allocation principles to ensure equitable access across disciplines.

When requesting more resources, be prepared to outline:

  • Workload or application (e.g., RNA-seq, climate model, ML training)

  • Resources required (cores, RAM, storage, GPU if needed)

  • Expected outcomes (publications, datasets, student projects, or community benefit)

For guaranteed capacity or sustained larger workloads, the Affordable Research Cloud (Academic & Nonprofit) tier offers priority access at discounted rates, with additional storage available at academic pricing..

Get Started

Apply today for your free 4 vCPU instance and run research-grade workloads at no cost for a year.

Apply Now