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.

“The need for computing power across today’s research landscape is huge, and it didn’t take long to realize the need for a highly available and cost-efficient professional environment that would eliminate cost, space, power and reliability limitations,” states Timothy Mullican, President and Founder of North Alabama Charitable Computing. “DC BLOX gives us the credibility and infrastructure capabilities we need to establish new partnerships with institutions at the regional and national level and NACC thanks them for their support.”

DC BLOX is provisioning 100Mbps of highly available Internet access backed by multiple providers in addition to a range of colocation services, including redundant power, cooling, high-speed and high-capacity networking and physical security.

“Serving locally is at the core of DC BLOX’s ethos, and we couldn’t be more proud and excited to provide North Alabama Charitable Computing with a firm foundation for success,” comments Kurt Stoever, DC BLOX Chief Sales and Marketing Officer. “NACC is doing important work and we share their goal to improve our lives through research and technology. We look forward to seeing NACC grow and become an even greater resource for the research community.”

To learn more about DC BLOX, please visit www.dcblox.com.