The Crick is proud to have played a leading role in creating the framework for a new shared data centre. In line with the institute's collaborative ethos, this facility will allow researchers from participating organisations to access each other's research data.
Early on in the planning process we agreed that the Crick's research data would be stored off-site. We also realised that there were major benefits to sharing resources with other institutions, particularly in terms of scientific analysis. As the Crick's plans developed, a number of institutions - both within the original partners and more broadly - had similar requirements and identified the same potential for collaboration in having a co-located shared data centre.
David Fergusson, the Crick's Head of Scientific Computing, said: "The shared nature and scale of the data centre makes it a unique research capability. It will allow researchers to share large data sets in an unprecedented manner and to address fundamental questions by searching across collections of data that are currently split across distributed locations.
"It represents a new level of collaboration between different research institutes."
The Crick's partners in this project are University College London, King's College London, the London School of Economics, Queen Mary University of London, and the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge.
The shared data centre will cover a space equivalent to nearly 10 tennis courts. It will hold 403,200 terabytes of data, roughly equivalent to more than 100 billion MP3 files, or 787,500 new top-spec MacBook Pro computers.
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