The National Strategic Planning and Analysis Research Center, or NSPARC, will host an opening ceremony for their new new data center April 20 which will be open to the public. The event is tailgate-themed, due to it being held the Friday of Super Bulldog Weekend.
The ceremony itself—short speeches and a ribbon cutting—is at 1:30 p.m. Food and drinks are available following the ribbon cutting, as well as music from the Mississippi State University Jazz Ensemble and tours of the facility.
Significantly larger than their first data center, the new data center, located within the Thad Cochran Research Technology and Economic Development Park at 100 Technology Drive, is 3,300 square feet, with 2,000 dedicated solely to IT processing and data storage. The building contains 20 servers and 60 CPUs, running 567 virtual servers and the data center can store 400 terabytes of data, which equates to about 570,000 full-length movies.
Laura McPhail, NSPARC’s communications manager, describes the organization’s need for the new data center, following NSPARC’s rapid expansion.
“NSPARC has grown a lot in the last couple of years, and so, the amount of work we are being approached to do, the amount of research and the amount of data that we are handling is also growing,” McPhail said. “To have the data center here and have something that has the capability of expanding with us, that was what was absolutely necessary for us to have.”
As to what NSPARC’s goal is, McPhail describes it concisely.
“NSPARC’s mission is to promote the use of data science to further human progress,” McPhail said. “We work a lot with sociologists on campus, and really around the world. They’re identifying these big problems that are within societies and trying to come up with solutions that are gonna make everyday life better.”
NSPARC goes about this by analyzing data and writing their own software to efficiently solve the customer’s problem. Their biggest project to date is the Mississippi Works system, which is a publicly-run job-finding system for the state.
According to a fact sheet released by NSPARC, 54.1 terabytes of data goes through the center annually, with 16 terabytes being stored by NSPARC at its present location.
One of the end goals of NSPARC is the idea of a “smart city,” or a model of a city using data and data-based programs to more efficiently run day-to-day procedures. Associate Center Director of IT Hal Bullock explains the smart city in more detail. For instance, Mississippi’s law enforcement can give NSPARC welfare data, and NSPARC can return with the examples of fraud they have found.
Additionally, Bullock described a new system they have been working on with Jones County Junior College. NSPARC takes job market data and undergraduate data to help JCJC better equip students for majors and programs which will serve them in the workforce.
“It’s helping people make better decisions and actionable decisions on the information that they have,” Bullock said. “So, you can have all sorts of information, but if you can’t make smart choices based on that information, it’s just a pile of digits in a database someplace.”
McPhail encourages people to attend the ceremony to celebrate not only the success of NSPARC, but also the impact the public had in helping NSPARC to realize its new goals.
“It takes a lot of people to support a project like this, and we’re just absolutely, truly grateful that we had so much support from the university, from the city and from the state of Mississippi in getting it done,” McPhail said. “So, we want to have this ribbon cutting as a display of, ‘Look, we’ve crossed the finish line. We’re excited, and we’re really happy to share our success with the public.’”