FY2026 Accomplishments
Great Lakes 2 Coming FY27
As demands for research computing continue to grow at U-M, ARC is rising to meet them. In FY2026, the request for proposal (RFP) and purchase of the next high-performance computing (HPC) environment, Great Lakes 2 (GL2), were approved. GL2 will be a major upgrade to ARC’s primary HPC systems, ensuring our researchers can compete in the digital era and be less bottlenecked by computation. Great Lakes 2 is scheduled to be deployed in FY2027.
Bridge Data Center
With updated high-performance computing environments comes a need for increased data center capacity. This fiscal year, ARC finalized the contract for 500KW of Bridge Data Center capacity to hold Great Lakes 2, with options to expand. This will ensure sufficient digital laboratory space for our research community, greatly expanding the capacity of existing campus facilities.
Turbo Research Storage Upgrade
Improvements made to Turbo Research Storage in FY2026 have led to drastic performance improvements for researchers who need access to their data. The compute investments in Great Lakes 2 will cause an increase in demand for access to data stored in Turbo—the improvements made this year will allow Turbo to meet those demands.
“Many researchers use multiple ARC services that rely on each other in some way. When we plan for an increase in capacity for our high-performance computing systems, we know it has the potential to strain the other services, like storage. By making these improvements ahead of GL2 deployment, we can ensure that data stored in Turbo will be available to researchers for computational analysis on the new cluster, without delay.” — Brock Palen, Director of Advanced Research Computing
Data Den Research Archive
Data Den research archive continues to fill the need for data retention at a low cost and energy impact. After doubling its storage capacity in FY2025, this past year saw an incredible increase in its use, from 22 petabytes to 30 petabytes, making it the single largest collection of university research data. At this increased capacity, Data Den’s Linear Tape-Open format storage system saves a sizable amount of energy - approximately 2,000 tons of CO2 each year compared to high-performance storage of the same capacity.
UMRCP
The University of Michigan Research Computing Package (UMRCP) provides eligible researchers on campus with access to cost-free computing resources. The package includes:
- 80,000 high-performance computing hours available on Great Lakes or Armis2
- 16 GB of RAM for Secure Enclave Services
- 10 TB of replicated, high-performance storage with Turbo
- 100 TB of archive storage with Data Den
UMRCP serves as an investment in research at U-M. The improvements and increased capacity of ARC’s high-performance computing, storage, and secure computing services will benefit all researchers utilizing the cost-free resources provided by UMRCP.