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.” 

ORNL has been selected to lead three research collaborations with fusion industry partners as part of the 2025 cohort of the Innovation Network for Fusion Energy program. The awarded projects will tap ORNL’s deep expertise in fusion materials, plasma diagnostics and advanced modeling and simulation to solve practical challenges and develop new technologies to accelerate the development of fusion energy.

NJIT's Matthew Loges ’25 and Assistant Professor Tomer Weiss explored how the collective behavior of ants — acting like both fluids and elastic materials — can inspire breakthroughs in engineering materials, robotics and traffic control. Their simulation work, recognized at the prestigious ACM SIGGRAPH conference, highlights how studying biological swarm dynamics may lead to innovations such as self-healing concrete and smarter multi-agent systems.

In a new study, CU researchers found that honeybees used adaptive strategies to build stable, usable honeycomb on irregular and imperfect surfaces.