Data Intensive Computing

Overview

UMIACS develops and supports Data Intensive Computing built on a wide range of storage systems in order to meet the requirements of its faculty and research programs. Taken as a whole, the Institute manages approximately five hundred terabytes of persistent storage on its systems. However, each lab has unique requirements that preclude any single data storage system. Instead, the Institute's storage systems are heterogenous. They are built on a variety of data storage components and they employ many different storage models. For example, the Institute currently supports:

• Shared Storage Area Networks built on Engenio, 3par, Compellent, and Data Direct Networks systems to support File Servers, Relational Database Management Systems, Network Attached Storage Gateways and VMware.
• Large arrays of Direct-Attached Disks using Nexenta ZFS and Open Stack
• Parallel File Systems based on GPFS and Lustre
• Map-Reduce Systems based on Cloudera Hadoop
• Data Grids based on the SRB and iRODS
• Tape-based Storage in the Tivoli Storage Manager

Applications

These systems support researchers who are studying approaches to storing, disseminating, and manage digital data as well as those who need to interact with very large collections of digital data. Their work has been accessible to the public through a number of popular Electronic Archives, Digital Libraries, and online data repositories including:

• The Transcontinental Persistent Archive.
• The International Children's Digital Library.
• The Global Landcover Facility.
• Chronopolis -- the National Digital Preservation Network.
• Operon - A System for the Prediction of Operons in Microbial Genomes
• Transterm - A system for finding rho-independent transcription terminators in bacterial genomes.

Selected Facilities