Iowa State University is to retire its last mainframe systems this summer.

The university this week announced its mainframe system will be shut down on June 1. After the shutdown, the drives will be destroyed and the IBM cabinets removed from the data center in the Durham Center basement.

Iowa State's legacy systems primarily were ADIN (short for administrative information system) and AccessPlus, the 1996 web interface for ADIN functions.

The legacy systems have been in read-only status for about 18 months, and most university employees will lose access to that in mid-May. In their place, the university relies on Workday and its cloud platform, which was first adopted in 2016.

The current IBM hardware was purchased in 2020. The first two modules launched in summer 2019, with a third added in over an 18-month period concluding Fall 2024.

A fourth rack replicates the third rack's backup function but is located off campus at a site in Germantown, Maryland. It also will be decommissioned in June.

Founded in 1858 as the Iowa Agricultural College and Model Farm, Iowa State is a public research university based in Ames, some 35 miles north of Des Moines.

The university’s 108,3030 sq ft (10,065 sqm) Durham Center – officially the Charles W. Durham and Margre Henningson Durham Center for Computation and Communication – opened in 1989. It hosts the Nova system, an Intel Skylake-based HPC cluster that launched in 2018. It previously hosted the Cyence cluster, launched in 2013.

The university’s earliest mainframe systems date back to around 1970 and were located in the basement of the nearby Pearson Hall building. The deployment covered an area approximately 50 ft by 30 ft (15 x 9 m). The hardware was generally updated every three to five years.