King’s College claims a world first

26 June 2015

Around the start of the year, King’s College London had the idea of rebranding itself as simply King’s London. But instead of dropping the word “college”, the university instead dropped the whole idea of changing its name.

But while superficial name changes can be debated, what cannot be avoided is the need to stay up-to-date with the technology of the day, and – if possible – stay ahead of the game.

And in-keeping with its global profile, King’s College London claims to have established the first “UK and world collaborative research data centre”. The aim is “to drive research and maintain the UK as a global research powerhouse”, says the university. The university worked with Infinity SDC to develop the centre.

Previously, the data centre facilities at the university were inefficient, with outdated infrastructure and an unsuitable environment for future technology development. The result was an ad-hoc evolution of technology and infrastructure, which was not conducive to the research aspirations of the college.

This was compounded by the increased need for computational solutions to undertake larger medical research programmes such as High Performance Computing clusters which handle and analyse large amounts of data at high speed.

The CIO of King’s College, Nick Leake, decided to develop contacts with other universities as well as Jisc, the provider of the Janet network that serves 18 million users.

Through these contacts, Jisc formed a partnership with King’s College London and five other founding partners including University College London, The Sanger Institute, The Francis Crick Institute, The London School of Economics & Political Science and Queen Mary University of London.

And through a careful procurement process, King’s College selected Infinity Slough's data centre to provide the facilities for the collaborating group of partners to establish the shared facility for education and research.

“The procurement was undertaken so any other UK university, NHS academic science centre or research institution could also take advantage of the facility if they wished to,” says Leake.

“Moving to the new facility has allowed King’s College to plan, purchase and combine HPC technology to increase computing power. The team has been able to develop a clear HPC strategy, enabling King’s to provide better HPC facilities for researchers.”