Indiana U. Plans 198,000 SF Data Center

The Indiana University Trustees have approved plans for a 198,000 square foot "Cyber Infrastructure Facility" on the Bloomington campus that will include a disaster-tolerant data center. Construction on the data center and adjoining IT operations building is expected to be completed within the next two years.

The data center will be a one-story facility built partially underground, which will house Big Red, one of the 50 fastest supercomputers in the world. Big Red is a distributed shared-memory cluster, consisting of 512 IBM JS21 Blades, each with two dual-core PowerPC 970 MP processors and 8GB of memory, running on the SuSE Linux Enterprise Server operating system. Big Red has achieved peak performance of more than 15 teraflops on numerical computations.