Canarie - Outcomes

Working together with our provincial and territorial partner networks and research funding agencies, CANARIE creates a powerful web of Canadian brainpower by connecting over 40,000 scientists and researchers at hundreds of research labs, hospitals, universities, and colleges across the country. CANARIE’s advanced networking technologies enable collaboration and sharing of research data, tools and analyses – whether these are located across the country or across the ocean, as CANARIE links with 100 international peer networks in over 80 countries.

CANARIE enables a range of activities that have tangible impacts in Canadian communities across the country:

• Enabling tele-health and tele-education services to communities in Canada’s north;
• Ensuring the safe operation of oil exploration and development activities in Canada’s northeast Atlantic Ocean, through the sharing of data between Environment Canada and the Department of Fisheries and Oceans that provides enhanced weather forecast systems, better prediction of pack ice and iceberg movements, and better understanding of the evolving ocean environment;
• Supporting the development of innovative educational programming, including videoconferences between scientists at the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa with educators and schools across Canada;
• Enabling the University of Toronto to transmit a portion of its vast library holdings to the Internet Archive (www.archive.org), thereby providing access to this rich trove to all Canadians with an Internet connection; and
• Supporting distributed education via videoconferencing, providing educational opportunities to Canadians in remote and rural communities.

"CANARIE enables both discovery and applications-oriented research, and companies like RIM rely on both kinds of research to develop world-class products that position Canada as a global leader in discovery and innovation."

Mark Pecen, Vice President, Advanced Technology, Research in Motion Limited

CANARIE also supports a range of “Big Science” endeavours, including:

• TRIUMF, Canada’s Nuclear and Particle Physics Laboratory, which receives data, via CANARIE, from the Large Hadron Collider located at CERN, in Geneva, Switzerland. TRIUMF scientists are storing and processing these data in order to search for, and understand, the origin of mass, among many other things.
• the NEPTUNE and VENUS ocean observatories, which use CANARIE to transmit data, in real time, from a range of sophisticated instruments on the ocean floor. This enables a wide range of ocean scientists to take advantage of data and images that will help us to unlock the many mysteries of our oceans and to better understand how our oceans are changing over time.
• CANARIE is enabling remote access to the Canadian Light Source, Canada’s national synchrotron facility, located in Saskatchewan. Scientists across the country may now manipulate equipment, conduct experiments and analyze results from their desktops, resulting in improved researcher productivity and accelerated research outcomes.

As more research, innovation and educational institutions are connected, the power of the CANARIE Network is amplified. In 2010:

• The CANARIE Network encompassed more than 17,000 km of fibre optic cable across the country. To put that into perspective, the circumference of the earth is about 40,000 km;
• In 2009, CANARIE transmitted 19,000 Terabytes of data, equivalent to the contents of a bookshelf that would circle the globe five and a half times;
• CANARIE traffic increased over 50% in 2009/2010 and has increased 200% compared to 2005/06;
• CANARIE is connected to 1,100 institutions across Canada, including universities, colleges, research labs, centres of excellence, schools, hospitals, government departments, and national and provincial cultural institutions.

For a complete overview of key outputs, outcomes and impacts enabled by CANARIE over the last year, please reference our Annual Performance Report for 2009-2010.