Originally posted to Data Center POST

DC BLOX, a provider of interconnected multi-tenant data centers that deliver the infrastructure and connectivity essential to power today’s digital business, recently announced its support of North Alabama Charitable Computing (NACC), a nonprofit organization that provides distributed computing resources for scientific research, including computing power for COVID-19 studies. Founded in Huntsville, AL, by Timothy Mullican, NACC provides compute and storage that support academic and scientific research, pooling resources via distributed computing platforms and internally-managed clusters that can then be provided to research organizations at no cost.

Mullican began in 2018 participating in various distributed-computing scientific research projects through the BOINC platform (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing), an open-source software platform for computing using volunteered resources. Today, most of the organization’s computing power has been used to support COVID-19 research, providing 40 years of computer run time and returning 103,665 modeling and simulation tasks via the IBM World Community Grid OpenPandemics – COVID-19 project in just a few short months.

However, as NACC grew and sought to expand its support of initiatives like this, power and maintenance costs became prohibitive. NACC was also looking to expand its charitable computing work by forming partnerships with local and national universities, but its reliability and power constraints became a challenge.

DC BLOX recognized the value and capability that NACC could gain if it were to migrate its infrastructure to a reliable, commercial data center. To help NACC overcome these challenges and continue its vital charitable work, DC BLOX donated colocation space and power, and it is also providing dedicated Internet access for the nonprofit’s compute infrastructure. With these DC BLOX resources, NACC can now deliver the reliability, security, bandwidth and speed that enable new partnerships and bolster its charitable capability throughout the academic and scientific world.

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