CANARIE, Canada's Advanced Research and Innovation Network, is launching a research and development environment - Digital Accelerator for Innovation and Research (DAIR) - where Canadian firms can develop, test and demonstrate innovative information and communications technology (ICT) products, services and protocols.

The DAIR Program will allow small- and medium-sized ICT companies to create new, complex, large-scale products and demonstrate them to customers, without building a costly R&D infrastructure themselves. ICT researchers investigating next-generation Internet technologies will also benefit. The program will enable collaboration between industry and the research community and provide market feedback from potential customers.

Scheduled to be operational in March 2011, the DAIR program will run on a dedicated portion of the CANARIE network. Test nodes will be built for computing and storage resources with access to CANARIE. These resources will be virtualized and made available to testers via a "cloud" infrastructure. Access to the test nodes will be provided via Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), wireless, and through an institution's established connection to a regional advanced network, such as ORION.

"Canada's ICT sector has underperformed compared to its global peers," says Jim Roche, President and CEO of CANARIE. "CANARIE will leverage our network to stimulate the ICT sector and contribute to Canada's digital economy. Researchers and innovators will have the opportunity to move Canada's best ideas quickly from the research lab to the factory floor. Based on successful results of this pilot, we expect that the DAIR Program will form part of CANARIE's next mandate to support all aspects of the ICT sector."

Other countries already provide advanced test environments to enable collaborative and exploratory research and pre-commercial testing. In the U.S., the Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI) provides a comparable environment. In the European Union, this environment is provided by such initiatives as Future Internet Research and Experimentation (FIRE) and Pan-European Laboratory Infrastructure Implementation (PII).

Features of CANARIE's DAIR Program include "cloud-based" computing where shared resources are provided on demand; on-demand provisioning; instant scalability; and wireless and virtual private network (VPN) access.

Learn more at www.canarie.ca/dair.