By Jana Manolakos In 1993, the Canadian Government and the private sector launched a national network, the Canadian Network for the Advancement of Research, Industry and Education (CANARIE), designed to help scientists and academics link vast amounts of research data across Canada and the world. A year later in 1994, the World Wide Web followed, bringing internet to the masses. …

At the Perimeter Institute, considered the world’s largest research hub for theoretical physics, they ask big questions – and gather big data. Its researchers also have won the Buchalter Cosmology Prize for six consecutive years.

Canada is just beginning to catch up in the global race for the bigger, better computer with the country’s network of academic supercomputers, pushing up the leaderboard of the Top500 supercomputers on the planet. And even now, as the potency of these high-performance machines is being harnessed to find answers that were previously out of reach for Canadian researchers, companies like IBM, Google, Intel and Microsoft are leaping ahead with whole new breeds – quantum and exascale computers.