What You Can Do with a Free Fractional GPU
AI and scientific computing on the free tier
In addition to CPU-based instances, myresearchcloud.ca — Canada’s nonprofit research cloud — offers free access to fractional GPUs.
Each free.gpu instance includes:
1/3 GPU with 8 GB of VRAM
8 vCPUs
32 GB of memory
80 GB P-SSD (ephemeral, non-HA)
600 GB of S3 storage
These free resources are available for one year, giving Canadian researchers and citizen scientists a true entry point into modern AI and GPU-accelerated science. Additional storage is available at nonprofit academic rates.
Workloads That Fit Well on a Fractional GPU
A fractional GPU is designed for workloads that benefit from GPU acceleration without requiring a full card. Examples include:
AI model inference
Run LLaMA-2 7B or Mistral for NLP tasks.
Perform question answering, summarization, or lightweight fine-tuning.
Image generation & analysis
Use Stable Diffusion for image generation and modification.
Run GPU-accelerated microscopy or radiology analysis workflows.
Machine learning training (small to medium models)
Train CNNs for image classification.
Fine-tune transformer models on modest datasets.
GPU-accelerated science
Perform molecular docking, molecular dynamics, or small chemistry simulations.
Use CUDA-enabled scientific libraries for parallelized workloads.
Data visualization
GPU-accelerated rendering of complex graphs, volumetric data, or simulation outputs.
Why This Matters
Access to GPUs is the single largest unmet need in Canadian research. National allocation programs leave up to 75% of GPU requests unfulfilled, while commercial cloud pricing is beyond most academic budgets.
By offering fractional GPUs free for a year, myresearchcloud.ca provides a practical way for Canadian students, researchers, and citizen scientists to explore AI and GPU-accelerated science without cost barriers.
When to Scale Up
If your project requires full GPUs, multiple GPUs, or clustered HPC training, scalable resources are available through:
Academic & Nonprofit Services — Affordable Research Cloud (30–50% below hyperscalers).
Commercial Services — Enterprise Cloud for Research with guaranteed capacity.
Get Started
Apply now for your free fractional GPU instance in Canada. Start with 8 vCPUs and a fractional GPU, and run advanced AI and scientific workloads at no cost for a full year.