MRI: Acquisition of a Regional Resource for Long-Term Archiving of Large Scale Research Data Collections

University Of Oklahoma Norman Campus, Norman OK

Investigators

Abstract

The project will support University of Oklahoma (OU)'s acquisition, deployment and maintenance of a large-scale storage instrument -- the OU & Regional Research Store (OURRstore). This instrument will enable faculty, staff, postdocs, graduate students and undergraduates to pursue data-intensive research (by building large and growing data collections), and to share and publish these datasets (which they can make discoverable and searchable). Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) research is increasingly data-intensive, with massive growth of research data collections. Yet a substantial fraction of universities and colleges have been underprepared not only for the volume, velocity and variety of data, but especially for long term stewardship of rapidly growing data collections. In addition, many STEM research projects require substantial storage during their experiments, so much so that holding it all on disk is too expensive to be practical. This challenge is quickly becoming more acute, because disk prices are now improving much more slowly than in the past. OURRstore is a large-scale storage instrument, consisting of a substantial tape library, as well as crucial support subsystems such as servers, disk, network components and software. OURRstore allows the massive growth of storage capacity needed to address the requirements of the large and broad research community that it serves. Via an innovative, low cost business model, OURRstore offers a cost-effective data storage and access and solution. The research topics supported by the instrument include: weather forecasting, weather radar and weather data mining, including for severe storms such as tornadoes and hurricanes; earthquake triggers and seismology; data and modeling for agriculture, forestry, water and earth ecosystems; coastal simulation; molecular systems that control growth and development of vegetation; microbial contamination of infrastructure; effects of repeated stress on organisms; RNA processing in mitochondria; nanotechnology; visual neuroscience; physiological adaptation to extreme environments; astrophysical objects and stellar atmospheres; malware cybersecurity; influence of microblogs on social media. OURRstore maximizes its impact across the US in the following ways. First, it serves as a national model for affordable, large scale, long term, multi-institutional storage. Second, the OURRstore community includes a substantial number of people from underrepresented populations: over 200 research team members are one or more of the following: women, African Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans, disabled, and US veterans. Third, the instrument will enhance OU's current "Supercomputing in Plain English" webinar series, a popular outreach program. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.