An organization within the US National Institutes of Health has awarded a US university a $14.3 million federal grant to expand the school's data center that houses high-performance compute resources used by scientists to conduct research in genetics. The grant is part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, also known as the economic stimulus package.

Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Mo., will double the size of its existing LEED Gold-certified data center, located on its campus. The current data center floor is about 3,100 square feet, according to David Dooling, assistant director and research instructor at the university's Genome Center, part of its Genetics Department.

Washington University researchers participated in the infamous Human Genome Project, pioneered cancer patient genome sequencing and are currently working on decoding genomes of microbes in the human body.

Today, the 4 MW facility, with two fully redundant power paths, is cooled through a raised floor (4 ft.) and using a chilled water heat exchange system.

The plan is to start construction in the fall. The extended facility will be able to support twice the data center's existing compute and storage capacity, currently at about 3,000 processor cores and more than three petabytes, respectively.

While most of the servers at the data center were supplied by Dell, the system uses some HP, Sun and IBM machines as well. Most of the storage equipment is HP, but there are also NetApp, Hitachi, EMC and Xyratex arrays.

The Genome Center took possession of the data center in May 2008.