C3.ca is Canada's high-performance computing consortium. "The C3.ca community embraces Universities, Colleges, Industry and Government. Members share resources, people, tools and information over advanced networks, in support of meritorious research and innovation." C3.ca recognizes that Canada needs capability (machines with capabilities substantially beyond that of a desk top machine) and capacity computing (access to lots of resources). C3.ca is leading the country in the specification and development of Grid technologies to address capacity computing for Canada, and is working on defining the capability computing needs. The CISS initiative is an attempt to realize the C3 vision of sharing computing resources at a national level, addressing the capacity issue. New capabilities in Trellis will allow CISS to extend the range of applications it can support to help address the capability issue.

C3.ca made a submission to the Federal Government's Innovation Strategy initiative. In it, they demonstrate that Canada is woefully behind when it comes to high-performance computing resources for research. Read about it here.