CIF21 DIBBs: EI: North East Storage Exchange

Trustees Of Boston University, Boston

Investigators

Abstract

Research progress is increasingly dependent upon the available capacity of storage to flexibly exploit large volumes of digital information. The North East Storage Exchange (NESE) project creates a next-generation storage infrastructure specifically targeted at enabling new levels of collaborative research in projects regularly involving petabytes of information. This storage exchange will integrate with a computational and network infrastructure that links Harvard University, Boston University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Northeastern University and the University of Massachusetts system. This project contributes to building a national data infrastructure to support advanced research in such priority topics as health care, epidemiology, physics, and earth science, among others. NESE will provide a high capacity, highly networked, secure, cost effective, scalable, and accessible data store that lowers barriers to research, collaboration, and information sharing within and beyond the participating multi-university community. Some examples of NESE projects that will be early users of NESE include one of the four US Tier 2 centers that store and process ATLAS data from the Large Hadron Collider; the Center for Brain Science at Harvard University, which is generating 300 million micron-resolution images to map the billion neurons and synapses that make up a cubic millimeter of the human brain; and MIT collaborations with NASA and DARPA in next generation global ocean modeling and monitoring systems. NESE addresses several critical infrastructural challenges: the creation of a sustainable multi-institutional resource; advancement of methods for data retention, management, and access to sensitive research data; implementation of controls that simplify protection of sensitive data; and building a sustainable, collaborative operating infrastructure to support future research. This award by the Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Division is jointly supported by the NSF Directorate for Biological Sciences (Division of Biological Infrastructure), and by NSF's Understanding the Brain and BRAIN initiative activities.