UCLA Academic Technology Services

UCLA's Newest Research Data Center Arrives on Campus

In the early morning hours of Saturday, Jan. 29, a very large crane along with a semi trailer holding a 40-foot-long white, metal box showed up behind Royce Hall. This rather conspicuous event signaled the delivery of UCLA’s newest research data center. If that doesn’t quite make sense it’s because this particular data center is a fully self-contained structure know as a Performance Optimized Datacenter or POD.

Built by Hewlett Packard, this unique facility is a retrofitted 40’ by 8’ shipping container that has been extensively modified to support more than 1,500 compute nodes along with associated network and interconnect equipment. By incorporating the POD into the campus research data center strategy, UCLA was able to save more than $5 million from what a "brick and mortar" facility would have cost for the same capacity. UCLA will also realize an additional $184,200 per year in power savings.

IDRE and the Office of Information Technology broke ground on the POD – which is being brought on line to help meet the demand for high performance computing – last October. The POD is scheduled to go into operation starting April 2011.

Yoh Kawano, ATS/IDRE Technologist and Campus GIS Coordinator, is assisting UN relief workers in Japan by gathering and interpreting GIS data. Also, Hypercities Sendai maps Twitter posts from the affected region.

Announcements: The Institute for Digital Research and Education (IDRE) and Institute for Informatics (I2) are requesting proposals that will inform the next cyberinfrastructure strategy for UCLA. Apply Now to the UCLA Research Informatics and Computational Data Development Grant.

Cluster Hosting: IDRE provides researchers with a cluster design that is flexible and optimized for different research needs

Hoffman2 Cluster: Find out how you can use this cluster for your computational based research.

Visualization Portal and 3D Modeling Lab: Learn about this unique research and presentation facility and the interesting work being done there.

Visit the Portal: See the Visualization Portal schedule of open houses, which are open to the public.

Grant Proposals: Get help in identifying technology requirements for grant proposals.

UCLA Grid Portal: This application presents a common user interface to multiple Beowulf Clusters run by diverse UCLA entities. More about the Grid...

Geographic Information Systems: Access GIS data and maps.

Statistical Computing: An overview about statistical computing describes how you can access web based tutorials for STATA, SAS, and SPSS.

Classes: ATS offers classes in Statistics, High Performance Computing, and Visualization. Register for classes

Disabilities and Computing Program: Find out about training, loaner laptops, web accessibility consulting, and adaptive technologies through our Disabilities and Computing Program.

Software Licenses: Obtain information about UCLA license agreements and UC-Wide agreements from Software Central.

Listserv: Join an ATS listserv and get up-to-date news delivered via email on topics including Statistical Computing, Software Licensing, and Disabilities and Computing.