A server room in the School of Medicine Education 1 Building, or SOM Ed 1, will provide computing infrastructure for hundreds of research groups across campus after a recent renovation involving UC Riverside’s High-Performance Computing Center (HPCC).

The renovation relocated the HPCC’s operations and equipment to the server room and included physical upgrades to SOM Ed 1 after the HPCC’s old server room in the Genomics Building reached capacity several years ago. It will provide more space for equipment along with electricity and cooling systems required to run new high-powered machines.

Thomas Girke, director of the HPCC and a professor of bioinformatics, said the renovated facility is a gamechanger for UCR research. 

“It provides a new level of infrastructure for our researchers that will enable us to get additional grants … and it will provide capacity for future growth in terms of our research endeavors,” Girke said. “That is very important, because many things are very data driven nowadays.”

Girke estimated that with the renovation and updated data storage capabilities, the HPCC now holds 75% of all research data on campus, equivalent to the storage space of approximately 20,000 laptops. It also allows UCR to save on offsite or cloud data storage, he said.

HPCC, which was formed in 2017, includes over 200 labs and 1,000 users across campus. The center increases efficiency by facilitating the sharing of expensive computing infrastructure. 

“The part we are proud of as researchers is that this is a real community across the entire campus, and it’s open to anyone,” Girke said. “I think that is really a statement of sharing here on campus that community building and research have no boundary, so we work together and build infrastructure together.”

The center’s new space will also benefit UCR students. “We train a lot of students on working on high performance computing and powerful GPU systems that will develop their careers in artificial intelligence in the future,” Girke said.

The server room in SOM Ed 1 has housed core UCR IT resources since the Department of Statistics occupied the building. The server room remained the largest on campus after the building was renovated for the School of Medicine. 

The server room upgrade was more complex and time-consuming than simply moving hardware. The significant amount of electricity consumed and heat produced by the machines required electrical and cooling upgrades, seismic strengthening of the floor and ceiling, and other modifications that took several years. 

Once the upgrades were complete, the move itself happened in March over the course of about five days. HPCC users received notifications about the move, and research on the computers was stalled for several days while the systems were shut down and relocated, their longest outage to date. Girke said the physical move took about three days, with everything up and running again after a week. 

“We were very happy with that,” Girke said, expressing gratitude to the HPCC staff, UCR’s Facility Services, UCR Information Technology Solutions, and occupants of the SOM Ed 1 building for their support.