Our Story

From Grassroots Computing to a Canadian Research Cloud

myresearchcloud.ca is operated by Computing for Humanity, a Canadian registered charity dedicated to expanding access to computing for research and public benefit.

Our story began with a simple idea: useful computing infrastructure should not go to waste when researchers can put it to work.

What started with volunteers, donated enterprise hardware and a handful of systems has evolved into a Canadian-hosted research cloud providing CPU, GPU and storage resources to researchers, students, laboratories and citizen scientists.

The technology has changed.

The purpose has not.

Grassroots Beginnings

Computing for Humanity began under the name The Supercomputer for Cancer Research, reflecting our original focus on contributing donated computing capacity to cancer and biomedical research.

As the range of research projects we supported expanded, so did our mission. The organization evolved into Computing for Humanity, with a broader mandate to make computing resources available for research and public benefit.

That work grew out of volunteer computing and hardware reuse.

Organizations were retiring capable enterprise systems while researchers around the world needed additional computing resources. We saw an opportunity to connect the two.

With support from organizations including Ross Video, Ericsson, NAV CANADA, the Government of Canada and Schrödinger, donated infrastructure grew from a small collection of systems into thousands of processor cores and GPU resources.

Those systems supported research associated with organizations and institutions including the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, Indiana University, McGill University and Queen’s University.

The experience demonstrated something important.

Useful research infrastructure does not always have to begin with a large capital project. Community, partnerships, donated technology and technical expertise can also create meaningful scientific capacity.

From Donations to Sustainability

For several years, much of our infrastructure was built through volunteer effort and equipment donations.

That model allowed us to accomplish a great deal, but it also showed us the limits of relying entirely on donated equipment and volunteer time.

Research infrastructure needs continuity.

Researchers need to know that systems will remain available. Hardware needs power, networking, datacentre space, maintenance and replacement. Platforms need administration and support.

Support from the Catherine and Maxwell Meighen Foundation and the Trottier Family Foundation helped Computing for Humanity move from an equipment-donation model toward a more sustainable nonprofit research-computing platform.

Individual donors have also played an important role.

Through Benevity, employees in Canada, the United Kingdom and Japan have supported Computing for Humanity through workplace giving and payroll deductions. Friends, family members and supporters connected to our volunteers have also contributed directly to the charity.

That combination of foundation support, corporate participation, workplace giving, personal donations and volunteer effort has helped turn a grassroots initiative into durable research infrastructure.

Creating myresearchcloud.ca

myresearchcloud.ca grew directly from that experience.

We saw a recurring gap in the Canadian research ecosystem.

Canada has world-class Advanced Research Computing infrastructure and strong institutional computing environments. But not every research workload requires a supercomputer, and not every researcher has easy access to institutional infrastructure.

Many projects need something in between:

• A persistent virtual machine
• A modest CPU allocation
• A GPU for AI development or inference
• Several terabytes of storage
• A research server that can operate for months rather than hours
• Infrastructure for a student project, a small laboratory, an independent researcher or a citizen-science initiative

myresearchcloud.ca was created to help serve that space.

Building a Research Cloud

The next step was moving beyond individual donated systems and building an actual cloud platform.

That required more than servers.

It required Canadian datacentre capacity, networking, storage, virtualization, orchestration, security, operational processes and a sustainable service model.

Our partnership with ThinkOn provided an important foundation for that transition.

Together, we have been building myresearchcloud.ca as Canadian-hosted research infrastructure that combines nonprofit access with professional datacentre and cloud operations.

Computing for Humanity provides the research mission, platform expertise and community focus.

Our infrastructure partners provide the facilities and services needed to operate at a much larger scale.

The result is no longer simply a collection of donated machines.

It is a research cloud.

Opening the Cloud to Canadian Researchers

In 2026, myresearchcloud.ca moved into active service, opening applications for free research resources while expanding paid academic CPU, GPU and storage services.

Eligible Canadian researchers, students and citizen scientists can apply for free allocations for approved non-commercial research.

Research laboratories, institutions and larger projects can obtain additional capacity through paid academic services.

This combination is deliberate.

Free resources preserve the charitable mission that started Computing for Humanity.

Paid services help create the sustainability required to operate research infrastructure over the long term.

Together, they allow us to support both an individual researcher who needs a small virtual machine and an institution that needs a larger block of dedicated capacity.

Complementing Canada’s Research Computing Ecosystem

myresearchcloud.ca was not created to replace Canada’s national, regional or institutional research-computing infrastructure.

We were created to complement it.

Large HPC systems are the right environment for many computationally intensive workloads. Institutional infrastructure is often the best resource for researchers who have access to it.

But research computing increasingly includes cloud-style workloads, persistent services, small and medium compute environments, GPU development systems, research storage and interactive infrastructure.

Our role is to provide another path when that model better fits the research.

We believe a stronger Canadian research-computing ecosystem is one with more ways for legitimate research to find the infrastructure it needs.

Canadian Infrastructure for Canadian Research

As myresearchcloud.ca has grown, another principle has become increasingly important: Canadian research should have meaningful access to computing infrastructure located and operated in Canada.

Canada is placing renewed emphasis on domestic capacity, resilience and technological sovereignty. Research infrastructure is part of that equation. The ability to conduct Canadian research should not depend entirely on computing, cloud or data resources located outside the country.

Our compute and storage resources are hosted in Canadian datacentres.

That supports Canadian data residency, research agreements, institutional requirements and broader considerations around digital sovereignty.

It also keeps investment in infrastructure, technical expertise and research capacity within the Canadian ecosystem.

For us, sovereignty is not about isolation. It is about ensuring that Canadian researchers have meaningful domestic options, while continuing to collaborate with researchers, institutions and partners around the world.

Where We Are Going

The original Computing for Humanity model was based on sharing resources that might otherwise have gone unused.

That principle still matters.

But our ambition has grown.

We are building a permanent nonprofit research-computing platform capable of supporting individual researchers, students, laboratories, institutions and collaborative research programs across Canada.

That means:

• Continuing to expand CPU, GPU and storage capacity
• Developing partnerships with universities, colleges, research organizations, infrastructure providers and industry
• Helping researchers move from an idea, to an experiment, to a functioning research environment, and when appropriate, to larger national or institutional infrastructure

Most importantly, it means continuing to address the problem that started this work in the first place:

Good research should not stop because a researcher cannot get access to computing.

That was the idea behind Computing for Humanity.

It remains the reason myresearchcloud.ca exists today.