Simon Fraser University’s Burnaby campus is once again home to Canada’s most powerful academic supercomputer, following the installation of a new system, named Fir. The new Fir system replaces the Cedar supercomputer, housed at the Cedar Supercomputing Centre (the Centre) at SFU. Fir is ranked number 78 in the TOP500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers, the only Canadian system in the top 100 worldwide.

“The new Fir supercomputer represents a much needed, major upgrade to the national Canadian computing infrastructure,” says Dugan O’Neil, SFU’s Vice President Research and Innovation. “The growing importance of data for research in all types of academia and in industry continues to drive demand for high-performance computing, and we are meeting that need. Fir will drive research across Canada and I have no doubt it will facilitate significant advances in a wide range of fields in the coming years.” 

Researchers at the University of Maine are theorizing that human beings may be in the midst of a major evolutionary shift — driven not by genes, but by culture. Cultural practices — from farming methods to legal codes — spread and adapt far faster than genes can, allowing human groups to adapt to new environments and solve novel problems in ways biology alone could never match. According to the research team, this long-term evolutionary transition extends deep into the past, it is accelerating and may define our species for millenia to come.