A major California university has deployed an HP data center container to house IT infrastructure that extends its virtual high-performance-computing cluster used by more than 170 research groups.

University of California, Los Angeles, bought the container because its two brick-and-mortar data centers that support the HPC system were hitting the wall capacity-wise. “We had a sort of a critical mass of computing equipment we wanted to keep on campus,” Bill Labate, director of academic technology services at UCLA, told DatacenterDynamics.

Labate’s team concluded that deploying the 40ft HP POD would cost substantially less than retrofitting a building into a traditional data center. They estimated the brick-and-mortar retrofit would cost more than US$7m, and buying the container and building the platform and infrastructure for came to a total of $2.2m, Labate said.

Once fully populated with IT gear, the container is expected to weigh about 110,000lbs, so it needed a strong foundation. The university also had to extend chilled-water, power and fiber infrastructure to the new data center, whose total power capacity is 600kW.

The container will eventually house 1,500 compute nodes, which will be part of the general-purpose virtual HPC cluster spread over the three sites (two brick-and-mortar data centers and the POD).

UCLA scientists that use the cluster conduct research in a wide range of disciplines, including plasma physics, particle physics, chemical engineering, economics, genomics and more.