UCT’s upgraded Data Centre boosts resilience and efficiency
The major upgrade to the University of Cape Town (UCT) Upper Campus Data Centre has been successfully completed, enhancing the technological infrastructure behind many of UCT's online services.
Information and Communication Technology Services (ICTS) in collaboration with Properties and Services (P&S), began the comprehensive refurbishment project in 2021. The focus was on building resilience and improving capacity and energy efficiency. The conclusion of the project marks a significant milestone in strengthening the technological infrastructure that supports the university’s research activities.
The UCT Upper Campus Data Centre is a future-ready data centre designed to support UCT’s ambitions in research excellence and technological advancement for years to come, with scalable infrastructure that can grow and adapt to meet increasing demands and emerging technologies.
A key aspect is that the facility is highly secure and resilient. “It’s an ideal hosting space for research computation distributed around campus that needs these features to align with grant security requirements,” said Andre le Roux, director of Enterprise Infrastructure Services for ICTS.
The refurbishment has expanded the centre’s ability to accommodate satellite compute and storage resources dispersed throughout the institution, creating a more integrated and flexible data environment.
“The benefit to researchers is that they don’t have to worry about power, cooling and security of their physical compute and storage,” le Roux said. Modernised power and cooling systems enhance not only the reliability of the data centre but also its environmental sustainability, aligning with UCT’s broader goals to reduce the university’s carbon footprint.
Future-ready and flexible
In addition, the data centre may play a part in the strategic direction the university is about to embark upon. “It may not take on the traditional HPC approach,” le Roux said. “In essence, this capacity can be used to support UCT’s visionary ambitions to produce research and innovate in the field of ML/AI (machine learning and artificial intelligence).”
Providing a critical backbone for research
The revamped data centre also now serves as a cornerstone for UCT’s High Performance Computing (HPC) facilities. The HPC infrastructure represents a new era of accessible, high-performance scientific computing designed to accelerate research outputs and innovation.
It is a critical resource housed within this secure and robust environment, where researchers across disciplines access advanced computational power to propel cutting-edge studies, simulations and data-intensive projects.
Alongside HPC, the centre also houses the Research Data Store (RDS), a storage platform that provides huge pools of research data storage at a discounted price. The RDS supports UCT’s commitment to responsible data management, ensuring research data is both secure and accessible to approved users, facilitating collaboration and reproducibility of results.
Accelerating research outputs and innovation
Professor Mattia Vaccari, director of eResearch at UCT, emphasised the importance of the data centre upgrade for the research community. “This refurbished data centre provides the critical backbone for our HPC capabilities and research data storage,” he said. “It empowers our researchers with improved infrastructure that is reliable, efficient, and scalable to meet the growing demands of advanced research.”
The project also underscores ICTS’s commitment to enhancing the overall digital ecosystem that supports UCT’s research mission. The improved data centre capacity directly benefits research that requires intensive computing resources and secure data hosting, thereby supporting projects from foundational science to applied innovation.
With this state-of-the-art infrastructure, UCT solidifies its position as a leading research institution, powering high-performance computing and sustainable data management for its vibrant research community.
For more photos, visit https://icts.uct.ac.za/UCDC-complete#gallery.