Research Computing and Administration

Relative to other population research centers, MPC has very high computing demands. To process and preserve one of the world’s largest collections of population data, the Information Technology Core must maintain a powerful and secure computing environment. Mass disk storage is a special need; MPC has 30.4 terabytes of high-quality, redundant disk storage. MPC’s current computational cluster includes 22 multiprocessor server-class machines with a combined total of 58 processors and 124 gigabytes of memory.  The equipment is located in University-class data facilities, administered by the Division of Research Computing, CLA Office of Information Technology, and connected to the MPC offices via gigabit ethernet.

Backup security is essential, not only to safeguard the large investment of federal agencies in MPC data infrastructure projects, but also because the MPC data collection includes many uniquely-held datasets. The data protection infrastructure provided by CLA consists of fully automated tape and disk backups utilizing enterprise-class software. The system runs on a SunFire v440 server with four processors, 16GB of memory, and high-speed fiber channel connectivity. Tape backups are provided through a Qualstar TLS-8466 robotic tape library with 66 slots and three LTO-2 drives, capable of backing up 7.5TB of data every day. Backups are also done to disk to improve backup speed and facilitate restores. As part of the disaster recovery plan, backup tapes are shipped to a remote Iron Mountain Data Protection facility every week. During the next several years, we have plan to provide additional redundancy for key data collections through agreements with the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

If you are an MPC member and would like to make use of these services, please contact  Bill Block for more information.