MARK DIETRICH

MARK DIETRICH

As a leader in digital research infrastructure, I established Compute Canada as Canada’s national digital infrastructure (DI) for research and innovation, building new supercomputing, data analytics, and artificial intelligence capabilities and increasing Canada's standing in DI from 24th to 9th in the world, based on an analysis of statistics compiled by Top500.org.  

Successful, sustainable DI capabilities require a focus not only on the technology, but also on all the services that make up the DI ecosystem, and on the success of the researchers and innovators who need them. Managing the full life cycle of research assets (including big research datasets) is critical: I enabled Compute Canada to invest early in tools that could scale and work with big data, rather than just small files. Quantifying the impact of Compute Canada on Canada’s global research excellence contributed to our success convincing the Government of Canada to invest another $572 million in digital infrastructure in Budget 2018.

I set Compute Canada’s direction despite stakeholder uncertainty and, sometimes, antagonism. Our more concentrated model for DI would have both winners and losers among our stakeholder institutions, but all of our researchers would win through access to radically increased capabilities. Despite these anxieties, we succeeded in executing the total refresh of Canada’s DI platform, going from 24 data centres and nearly 50 aging systems to just 5 world-class supercomputers and data centres. The refresh reduced annual operating costs by 40%, increased compute and storage capacity 10X, and allowed Compute Canada to meet demand growth of over 50% per year and user growth of over 25% per year.  

I am proud of the team at Compute Canada and its partners, and at every organization I have led, and of what they have accomplished. These achievements include new investment, data centre consolidation and total technology refresh for Compute Canada, increased membership at OSPE, adoption of lean manufacturing in CME’s Smart Program, and use of Digital Power Network’s IoT tools for proactive maintenance at power companies. They all required a clear vision of the future, effective strategies for getting there, and a relentless focus on value for the customer and stakeholders.  
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