Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center has received two grants totaling $10.1 million from the National Institutes of Health to fund a new high-performance computing cluster and the creation of a campus-based facility to consolidate and safeguard research data.

The biggest award, $9.6 million from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, will increase the Hutchinson Center's capacity for high-performance data storage by 50% through the creation of an energy efficient facility that will safely store irreplaceable research data. Data centers are core computing facilities -- secure rooms that provide power, cooling and networking for servers and storage systems.

The new, 2,300-sq-ft data center will feature a state-of-the-art, hot-aisle/cold-aisle air separation design that will optimize cooling capacity and provide additional energy savings. The modular layout will permit expansion of data handling capacity to meet projected needs. The data center is scheduled to be up and running by late 2012.

The Hutchinson Center also received a $500,000 instrumentation grant to purchase a high-performance computing cluster. The cluster will increase computational processing power, reliability, and memory capacity, and speed biomedical research in numerous areas that are dependent upon computationally intensive technical approaches.