On May 16, 2018, the Virginia Tech Biocomplexity Institute’s long-anticipated new data center, built with an internal investment of $5 million, opened its doors and promises to bring the institute’s compute power to an unprecedented speed and scale.

Built to meet the current and future growth of the institute’s research computing needs, the new data center adds 2 megawatts of electrical power capacity. The first phase of this project will provide the capability to power and cool 20 racks of high-density compute racks with up to 50 kilowatts per rack of power consumption. This is more than 10 times the capability of previous data centers, which were out of space and cooling capacity.

The new data center will allow the institute’s researchers to perform increasingly complex simulations of massively interacting systems. Aiming to be global in scale, such simulations help researchers understand the underlying infrastructure of how social networks affect the spread of certain beliefs or how epidemics like Ebola spread through populations.

Two main compute clusters have been teamed to power the institute’s large-scale simulation experiments. Shadowfax, the institute’s hybrid-core cluster, has been paired with the 606-teraflop Discovery cluster. Previously used for climate simulations by NASA, the Discovery cluster, formerly known as Scalable Unit 8, was donated to the institute by NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in 2016.

Previously owned by the NASA Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS) at Goddard Space Flight Center, and used for a variety of climate, Earth, and space science modeling, the Scalable Compute Unit 8 (SCU8) portion of their cluster was donated to the institute in 2016 via the Stevenson-Wydler Act.