What You Can Do with 8 Free vCPUs
A year of free cloud compute for Canadian researchers
The free.large instance on myresearchcloud.ca includes:
8 vCPUs
32 GB of memory
64 GB P-SSD (ephemeral, non-HA)
400 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 tackle advanced workloads. Additional storage is available at nonprofit academic rates.
Workloads That Fit Well on 8 vCPUs
With 8 vCPUs, 32 GB of RAM, and 400 GB of storage, this tier supports more complex, parallelized, and memory-intensive workloads, including:
Science Gateways & Portals
Deploy domain-specific platforms like Galaxy for genomics, HUBzero, or discipline-focused gateways to serve teams or classes.
Genomics & bioinformatics pipelines
Run full RNA-seq workflows, variant calling, or parallelized gene annotation jobs.
Machine learning & AI inference
Support medium-sized PyTorch or TensorFlow models, multiple inference tasks, or fine-tune transformer-based NLP models.
Fractional GPU workloads
Pair your 8 vCPUs with an optional GPU (8 GB vRAM) for Stable Diffusion, LLaMA-2 7B inference, or small-scale ML training.
Collaborative projects
Well-suited for research groups, labs, or cross-institutional teams who need consistent access to shared compute.
Why This Matters
The 8 vCPU tier marks the threshold between exploratory research and production-level projects. It allows researchers to:
Test and refine workflows at scale
Run inference on real AI models
Support collaborative portals through Science Gateways
For many Canadian labs, this level of access — free for up to a year — is the difference between waiting in the queue and actually getting science done.
When to Scale Up
If your project outgrows 8 vCPUs, you can request to scale up to 16 vCPUs. Allocations are reviewed on request and subject to available resources, following FAIR allocation principles to ensure equitable access.
When submitting a request, be prepared to outline:
Research workload or application (e.g., genomics pipeline, ML training, climate model)
Resources required (vCPUs, memory, storage, GPU if applicable)
Expected outcomes (publications, datasets, student projects, or community benefit)
For guaranteed capacity or sustained workloads, the Affordable Research Cloud (Academic & Nonprofit) tier provides priority access at discounted rates, with additional storage available at academic pricing
Get Started
Apply today for your free 8 vCPU instance and begin running advanced research workloads at no cost for a year.