Canarie - Outcomes

CANARIE contributes to Canada's competitiveness by enabling world-class research, revolutionizing the delivery of education, and enabling new ways to train the next-generation of highly qualified people who join companies, create policy or educate leaders of the future.

The CANARIE network allows researchers to collaborate in highly data-intensive research initiatives. This capability enables researchers to answer important questions and create new knowledge which will lead to discoveries, innovation and, in some cases, to commercialization.

Climate change is one of the biggest threats facing our collective social well-being. Current approaches to address this problem focus largely on taxes or cap and trade systems, both of which slow the rate of innovation and economic development.

CANARIE is one of the first organizations in the world to recognize that broadband networks and technologies such as computer hardware and software can play a role in reducing our carbon footprint while at the same time creating new opportunities for innovation and economic growth.

CANARIE's work in this critical area could help to reduce Canada's greenhouse gas emissions, helping to slow the rate of global warming and position our country as a major player in a future zero carbon economy.

CANARIE's global leadership in Green Information Technologies (the study and practice of using computers and telecommunications in a way that maximizes positive environmental benefit and minimizes the negative impact of carbon emissions) has significantly enhanced Canada's innovation and research capacity.

Companies large and small have already adopted and implemented many ideas and concepts originally developed by CANARIE such as 'User Controlled Lightpaths' (communications channels that connect two end-points in the network¹) which now has been commercialized by companies like Cisco Canada and Inocybe. It is also the foundation of the major research and commercialization initiatives in Europe such as Phosphorous, Frederica and 4Ward.

¹ http://wiki.glif.is/index.php/Main_Page

CANARIE is helping to strengthen Canada's scientific contribution internationally, enabling its full participation in many collaborative, global science initiatives. This includes the:

• Large Hadron Collider (LHC) initiative: LHC is a gigantic scientific instrument based at CERN near Geneva, where it spans the border between Switzerland and France about 100 metres underground. It is a particle accelerator used by physicists to study the smallest known particles - the fundamental building blocks of all things. It will revolutionize our understanding, from the minuscule world deep within atoms to the vastness of the Universe.²


• Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) initiative - collaboration between The Association of Canadian Universities for Research in Astronomy, California Institute of Technology and the University of California). The TMT will be the most capable and advanced telescope ever constructed. When completed in 2018, the TMT will enable astronomers to detect and study light from the earliest stars and galaxies, analyze the formation of planets around nearby stars, and test many of the fundamental laws of physics.


• Square Kilometre Array (SKA) initiative for radio astronomy that will deliver the most sensitive telescopes ever built. create a single scientific machine capable of studying the first objects to shine in the Universe, the very beginnings of the cosmic avalanche of growth that resulted in mankind some 13 billion years later.³

² http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/LHC/LHC-en.html
³ http://www.skatelescope.org/PDF/news/090909_ICRAR-Launch_Newsletterdoc.pdf