Sponsoring

Sponsorships help us maintain and expand the compute cluster. WATcloud started out on a shoestring budget. Over the years, we learned to be extremely efficient with our resources. We maximize the utility per dollar by designing our architecture around low-cost commodity hardware, aggressively seeking out opportune purchase windows (e.g. sales, promotions, bulk discounts, auctions), and using robust software for infrastructure provisioning and monitoring. For example, in 2023, we built a workstation machine with 6 GPUs (144 GiB VRAM in total), 512 GiB RAM, and 128 logical cores for less than CAD $23,000¹. An equivalent machine from a system integrator would cost at least CAD $12,000 more².

Your impact

WATcloud is used by students and researchers at the University of Waterloo and partnering student organizations. Our users come from a wide range of backgrounds, including computer science, engineering, and mathematics. They use WATcloud to run simulations, train machine learning models, and perform data analysis for projects like autonomous driving, robotics, and computational biology. WATcloud is maintained by a team of volunteers, who also gain valuable experience in system administration, DevOps, automation, and cloud infrastructure. As of January 2024, over 450 students and researchers have benefited from WATcloud, producing numerous research papers and projects. By sponsoring WATcloud, you will be supporting the next generation of researchers and engineers.

What you get

If you are a company, we will feature your name on our website and in our promotional materials. We will also mention your sponsorship in our social media posts. If your contribution is significant, we will also refer students from both WATcloud and our parent organization, WATonomous (opens in a new tab), to your company for co-op and full-time positions. If you are an individual, we will discuss with you on how you would like to be recognized.

How to sponsor

If you are interested in sponsoring WATcloud, please contact us at [email protected].

Our sponsors

We would like to thank the following organizations and individuals for their generous support:

• UWaterloo Math Endowment Fund (MEF) (opens in a new tab) for providing numerous rounds of funding to purchase hardware (parts of wato-wato1, wato-wato2, wato-wato3, wato-tr, and wato-thor were funded by MEF).
• UWaterloo Engineering Endowment Fund (WEEF) (opens in a new tab) for providing numerous rounds of funding to purchase hardware (parts of wato-delta, wato-tr, wato-thor, and wato-trpro were funded by WEEF).
• UWaterloo Engineering Society (EngSoc) (opens in a new tab) for providing funding to purchase networking equipment and other peripherals.
• WATonomous (opens in a new tab) for providing the initial equipment for building the cluster (wato-wato1, wato-wato2, wato-wato3, wato-delta) and for continuing to provide a platform for WATcloud to grow³.
• UWaterloo Engineering Computing (opens in a new tab) for providing a server room and equipment to host the cluster, as well as for installing and maintaining the network interface to the rest of the campus.
• Prof. Derek Rayside (opens in a new tab) for contributing multiple machines and for providing advisory support.
• 1Password (opens in a new tab) for providing an in-kind sponsorship of their password manager.
• Teleport (opens in a new tab) for providing an in-kind sponsorship of their infrastructure access product.
• Cloudflare (opens in a new tab) for providing an in-kind sponsorship of their various products.
• Sentry (opens in a new tab) for providing an in-kind sponsorship of their error monitoring product.
• Elastic (opens in a new tab) for providing an in-kind sponsorship of their observability products.