From long-term storage of research data to capacities for powerful supercomputers

The data centre will take shape in the context of needs for a national infrastructure for open science, and will address the challenges of long-term storage of research data. In this way ARNES will facilitate an infrastructural, and following that a practical, base point that will contribute to ensuring fulfilment of the FAIR principles and in that way to the findability, accessibility, interoperability and reusability of data. Something of vital importance for the development of science and fulfilling the requirements of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) is access to a superlative international research infrastructure, in which the capacities of the ARNES data centre will play a leading part.

The data centre is part of the infrastructure for open science

The data centre will represent an important connector in the open science infrastructure, in which in recent years ARNES has updated the optic backbone and thereby enabled the data centre to also be able to serve the most demanding organisations.

The upgraded fast optic links that ARNES set up as part of the project Digitalisation for open science – establishing a backbone network also represent a major contribution to the digital transition in the research sector in Slovenia. After the upgrade we can provide greater reliability of the network, and the new connections also enable future upgrading of speeds up to 800 Gb/s. The connection of the ARNES optic backbone to the Europe-wide network GÉANT additionally ensures reliable international connectivity of the data centre with other European infrastructures, and in this way facilitates Slovenia’s integration into the modern infrastructure for science and education.

Sustainable design

Due to the close proximity of the Mariborski otok hydroelectric plant, the data centre will be able to exploit the energy potential of the Drava river, while at the same time the long-term plans call for the installation of solar generators on the roof of the facility, which will ensure an additional contribution to the use of renewable energy sources. Surplus heat from the operation of the data centre will be allocated for heating the residents of Maribor, and in this way the data centre will contribute even more prominently to a sustainable future, on the local, national and ultimately global level.

The data centre will be completed by 2026

A vital component of construction of the data centre is funding from the European Commission under Slovenia’s Recovery and Resilience Plan, which constitutes the most extensive portion of the financing within the European recovery and resilience programme NextGenerationEU, and the overall funds for digitalisation of science from the Ministry of Higher Education, Science and Innovation. This will enable the co-location of equipment that will provide for the education and research sectors ICT services, the hosting of equipment of public research organisations and universities, a new supercomputer and the long-term storage of research data with repository capacities.

Plans call for construction of another data centre in the Ljubljana area

Construction of the data centre in Maribor represents just one of the steps towards establishing superlative and internationally competitive infrastructure in Slovenia. The plans also involve the construction of a data centre in the surroundings of Ljubljana, which will serve to ensure redundancy for ARNES services. At the same time, upgrading the optic backbone in the future alongside greater speeds and reliability will contribute to the development of quantum technologies on the international level.