ACF Services Relocation

Background

The Government has committed, subject to availability of funding, to establish a UK Exascale supercomputer service for scientific and industrial research by 2025. The ACF has been chosen as the site to host this service.  To create the necessary headroom to facilitate the expansion of the ACF to host the Exascale system, a number of University owned systems run by ISG need to be relocated from the ACF.  Alongside this immediate capacity requirement, there are a number of academic schools experiencing capacity issues in hosting IT equipment, particularly for research. 

Scope

1. Identify the short term costed options and a recommendation for migrating University owned equipment from the ACF to ensure service continuity  
2. To develop medium -> long term costed options and a recommendation for University data centre capacity over a five to ten year period to ensure the institution has the necessary capacity to maintain excellence in research and in learning and teaching, and to support University operations. 

Remit

1. In developing the short term costed options and recommendation, the group will: 
2. Capture capacity requirements for equipment migrating for ACF (physical rack space, power/cooling) 
3. Recognise the need for the implementation of options to be delivered within the timescale of Dec 2022 (decision to deploy Exascale) -> April 2023 (ISG equipment relocated from ACF). 
4. In developing the short term options and the medium/long term options, the recommendation will be evaluated on a number of criteria to be decided by the working group.  These are expected to include sustainability (incl energy use, energy re-use and carbon emissions); capital cost; operational cost; resourcing; capacity planning / future use; service impact; physical security; resilience; network connectivity; legal implications to data sharing agreements; timescale to implement; ease of implementation and overall risk  
5. In developing options the working group will consider impact on the Green DC initiative and specifically on the ability to consolidate IT equipment from schools and colleges into consolidated facilities. 
6. The working group will consider the impact of any changes required to resite equipment from ACF on the current datacentre improvement plan for Mary Somerville and Appleton Tower datacentres.  In particular the impact of delay on implementation of fire safety.