WATERLOO — The University of Waterloo will use its share of a $30-million federal grant to install 11,000 servers in a former BlackBerry building as part of a huge increase in the computational power of a national computer research network.

Kitchener-Waterloo MP Peter Braid announced Thursday that UW, the University of Toronto, the University of Victoria and Simon Fraser University will share equally in $30 million in funding from the Canada Foundation for Innovation.

"It is a great day for supporting research and innovation," Braid said in an interview after the announcement.

"This funding today will help provide our world-class researchers with the equipment and tools they need to stay on the cutting edge," he said.

A building that used to be known as BlackBerry 5 will become one of four new hubs in what is called the advanced computing platform. The four server farms will be available to researchers at Canadian universities and replace the 50 server farms currently in use across the country.

The server farm at UW is expected to be operational by the end of 2016.

"In that building there is one floor that was effectively a server farm previously," George Dixon, UW's vice-president of research, said in an interview. "And we are renovating it in order to use liquid cooling as opposed to air cooling."

Liquid cooling is more efficient and allows for the installation of more servers.

UW will spend a total of $15.8 million on the new server farm. That includes the $7.5 million from the federal. Other funds will come from the Ontario government and industry.

Mark Dietrich, president and chief executive officer of Compute Canada, said the new server farm at UW will have the ability to produce six or seven, high-definition, animated movies a year.

"These are the kinds of things that can be run on these systems," Dietrich said in an interview.

Dietrich called the new research platform a huge advance for science in Canada. Researchers will be able to use the enhanced platform to analyze huge amounts of data, he said.