Center to increase University research

Indiana’s largest data center, a $32.7 million facility that will serve as a safe house for IU’s computer processing and data storage equipment, will be dedicated today.

IU President Michael McRobbie will formally dedicate the center at 3:30 p.m. today in a ceremony at 10th Street and the Indiana 45/46 Bypass. Preceding the event will be a reception and tours of the new facility.

“It will help students, especially graduate students because it will house current and future super computers which will help with research,” IU spokesman Larry MacIntyre said.

The new facility will support increased research and enhanced administration and teaching on all of IU’s campuses.

The center houses critical networking, storage and computing equipment that will serve all IU campuses through I-Light, a high-speed fiber optic network.

“It will provide a more stable and scalable environment for the research to occur in,” said Dennis Groth, associate dean for undergraduate studies for the School of Informatics and Computing.

The center also protects mission-critical information technology systems for safer storage of past and present academic degrees, course records and financial information.

FutureGrid, the $15 million project funded primarily by the National Science Foundation, is the first of many valuable projects to emerge from the research, knowledge and innovation the center will offer to all of IU’s campuses. New supercomputers will also be housed at the center to help with this project.

“Having this facility allows us to compete for research grants we could not achieve without it,” said Dennis Cromwell, IU associate vice president for enterprise infrastructure. “We could not have won this award without this facility.”

The Data Center will also directly benefit Indiana residents by providing back-up data space for the state, while helping the state to save money and reduce errors in the transmission of messages.

“Not only are we supporting and employing very important people on these discoveries, they are also becoming a part of the capital of the state,” Cromwell said. “The center is establishing an anchor of technology for all of IU’s campuses.”

The building is the largest data center among Indiana’s higher education institutions at 82,700 square feet, which includes three 11,000-square foot rooms for computer equipment and 2.8 petabytes – 2.8 million gigabytes – of information. It is also made of concrete and bunkered so that it will be able to withstand power outages, floods or tornadoes.

The Data Center will also directly benefit Indiana residents by providing backup network connectivity and data space for the state, which will help save money and provide critical redundancy.

The IU Data Center, along with the IU Innovation Center and the forthcoming Cyber Infrastructure Facility, will form the basis of IU’s upcoming technology park in Bloomington.

“Establishing the data center is a critical step for the campus in providing an infrastructure to support the computing and computing resources of the campus,” Groth said.