CC* Data Storage: NRDStor: Nebraska Research Data Storage

The Holland Computing Center (HCC) at the University of Nebraska (NU) has a long history of providing high-performance and high-throughput compute capabilities and the associated storage resources. A long-standing hurdle many NU researchers experience is the difference between their traditional work environments (i.e., desktop) and HCC computing environments, often incurring non-trivial data transferring across these environments.

The Nebraska Research Data Storage (NRDStor) creates a cyberinfrastructure storage resource that unites the familiarity of a researcher’s desktop environment with HCC’s computing resources. NRDStor is accessible on HCC’s computing clusters, as well as mountable by researchers on their lab computers and laptops. Fast data transfers between research labs and NRDStor are enabled by leveraging recent upgrades to campus networking.

Data stored on NRDStor may be shared (at the user’s discretion) via the Open Science Data Federation (OSDF).

NRDStor is available to all HCC users, including the four primary NU campuses in Lincoln, Omaha, the Medical Center in Omaha, and Kearney. The science drivers of NRDStor span the diverse scientific communities that vary in practice from computational biology to wireless networking and encompass many domains in-between. By providing a united filesystem accessible to researchers on both their desktop environment and the clusters, NRDStor can lower a barrier of entry and create a more consistent research environment, lessening their time to science.

Moreover, this effort can provide undergraduates with valuable professional development experience by incorporating them to assist HCC professionals in administrating the NRDStor resource and pursuing researcher needs.

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.