ORION is busy connecting new organizations to the network this fall, including the world-renowned Perimeter Institute, and the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM), one of Canada's most important cultural institutions, celebrating its recent expansion with a virtual expansion to the global grid of research and education (R&E) networks.

The Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics is an independent, non-profit research centre in Waterloo, where international scientists cluster to contemplate and calculate the very essence of space, time, matter, and information. In addition to research into foundational issues, the Institute also provides educational outreach activities for students, teachers, and members of the general public across Canada and beyond.

"Perimeter has joined the ORION network to better support scientific collaboration opportunities and to improve access to researcher services such as SHARCNET, the high performance computing consortium," said John McCormick, director of information technology at the Institute. "Specific collaboration projects include seminar participation via videoconferencing, Access Grid, and Mediasite technologies where the presenter may be located either at Perimeter or at a remote site." Perimeter Institute will also use its ORION connection to expand its educational outreach programs to students, teachers and the general public.

The Royal Ontario Museum, now celebrating its new landmark building is moving to connect to ORION later this fall.

The Waterloo Region District School Board, one of Ontario's largest with nearly 60,000 students, the Kawartha Pine Ridge District School Board, and the Peterborough, Victoria, Northumberland and Clarington Catholic District School Board are the latest to join ORION. More than 740,000 Ontario students are now connected to the network, with several more school boards making plans to connect shortly.

ORION also completed connections to support Trent University's participation in the SHARCNET distributed computing consortium. Also about to finalize their SHARCNET links are the Ontario College of Art & Design (OCAD), and Lakehead and Laurentian Universities.

Back to Headlines