IBM helps Nova Scotia universities prepare students for careers in analytics 

“Cloud is now providing incredible opportunities for collaborative research across Canada,” says Dan Fortin, president, IBM Canada. “This shared computing platform in Nova Scotia will support advanced research today, and will be used to build the much-needed analytics skills for tomorrow.”

The system – which will go live in 2014 – will be hosted at Dalhousie University, although it will be accessible to faculty and students at Acadia University, Cape Breton University, Mount Saint Vincent University, Nova Scotia Community College, Saint Mary’s University, and St. Francis Xavier University through a single-portal log-on process.

The schools will use the system to train their students for careers in analytics, in response to the explosion in Big Data that has been occurring in the past few years. It is hoped that this training will provide students with the skills they need to fill up to 500 positions within Nova Scotia by 2020.

The system will give faculty and students access to servers, storage, applications, and services, as well as a wide range of IBM analytics software products.

“A collaboration involving seven post-secondary institutes in Nova Scotia is a unique way to address an upcoming skills shortage in an important sector,” said Michael Shepherd, dean, Faculty of Computer Science, Dalhousie University. “The ability to share a common system among all schools allows us to get started on collaborating as educators and researchers to meet our shared goals. There are always benefits to working together and this shared infrastructure will really allow CARET to leverage each institution’s unique programming, resulting in highly skilled students ready to enter the workforce.”

The platform is based on IBM Flex Software and IBM Storwize hardware, and it will run the Apache Software Foundation Virtual Computing Lab (VCL) software.