Energizing Research through Cyberinfrastructure: Renovation of the Research Data Center

Purdue University, West Lafayette IN

Investigators

Abstract

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5). This Energizing Research through Cyberinfrastructure (ERTC) project will address the impact of the growth of cyberinfrastructure by renovating the research data center (RDC) located in the Mathematical Sciences Building (Math Building) at Purdue University. The research data center is the hub for Purdue's cyber-enabled research. In 2000, Purdue faculty research used 628,000 CPU hours from Purdue resources. By 2008, the usage had increased to over 57.4 million CPU hours. As a result of this growth of computational research, the electrical and cooling infrastructure has been fully utilized, limiting researcher's ability to expand their computational research programs. The project will improve the reliability of the research data center and increase the electrical and cooling capacity to support the addition of two more research computing clusters scheduled for 2012 and 2013. Currently, loss of power to the data center could result in the significant loss of work for the researchers. The data center is the home of the community cluster program which impacts a broad range of scientific research from nanotechnology to climate modeling to structural biology. The two existing community clusters support 66 faculty members representing over 20 departments from 7 of Purdue's 10 Colleges/Schools. The ERTC project will have a significant local and national impact on the scientific community. Locally, the renovation will allow the computing community cluster program to continue to grow--allowing faculty members to focus on their science, maintaining high utilization, and achieving the highest levels of operational excellence. On the national scale, the project will allow Purdue to expand the resources available to the national research community, to which Purdue provided over 16 million CPU hours in 2008.