ACADEMIA

Facilities dedicated to high-performance computing, networking, and data storage present unique challenges. How will these facilities evolve to meet the need for greater capacity while mitigating environmental impact? What innovative solutions will ensure that these environments are fault-tolerant, energy-efficient, flexible, scalable, maintainable, and cost-effective? What strategies will maximize productivity and minimize downtime? What are some of the best practices for developing a realistic facility program, budget, schedule, and migration plan? The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA / www.ncsa.uiuc.edu) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will tackle these challenges as part of the Blue Waters project (www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/BlueWaters), which will build and deploy the first sustained-petascale supercomputer for open scientific research. On Feb. 12-13, 2008, NCSA will host a free workshop on "Building the Data Center of the Future: Effective Energy-Efficient Design." The workshop will bring together experts from research centers, the IT industry, and engineering, consulting, and architecture firms to explore the challenges involved in planning, designing, engineering, constructing, monitoring, and maintaining the data center of the future. Sponsors for the workshop include NCSA, EYP Mission Critical Facilities, and IBM. For more information and to register, go to http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Conferences/DataCenter/. A full agenda will be posted on the website soon!