MRI: Acquisition of a Scalable Petascale Storage Infrastructure for Data-Collections and Data-Intensive Discovery

University Of Colorado At Boulder, Boulder CO

Investigators

Abstract

The Center for Research Computing (CRC) at the University of Colorado Boulder (CU-Boulder) will acquire, deploy and maintain an expandable petascale storage instrument, the CU-Boulder petaLibrary. This instrument, consisting on an integrated disk and tape system, will enable faculty, staff, postdocs, graduate and undergraduate students to build, store, share and merge large and growing data collections. The petaLibrary will be made available to all CU-Boulder researchers at no usage charge other than the cost of the media. The petaLibrary will serve as the infrastructure for a number of data services provided by the University Libraries, the Museum, the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) and the CRC to the CU-Boulder campus community. The services will include the deposit and discovery of a wide range of digital resources, including digital surrogates of archives and special collections materials owned by libraries and museums on campus, openly accessible resources, digital media only library resources and the scholarly output of the campus. Data-intensive projects include digital collections; high fidelity, high definition recordings of human interaction; global-scale land remote sensing; bio-digitization efforts by the Museum; as well as research programs utilizing CU-Boulder's computational resources. The broader impacts of the project include the development of workshops on data archival and long-term data formats for researchers, research projects and educational opportunities with the CRC for graduate and undergraduate students. Other efforts will include working with The Colorado Coalition for Gender and IT (CCGIT) and the National Center for Women and Technology (NCWIT) to address the limited diversity in IT, specifically in the area of cyberinfrastructure by providing summer internship opportunities for female faculty in data management related topics.