Research Infrastructure: CC* Data Storage: Rice Collaborative Object Store

Research in areas such as modeling and simulation, AI and machine learning, large-scale geospatial analysis, automated data mining of large digital text and image collections, and bioengineering produce terabyte and petabyte-scale data sets that require production-level storage, access, and transfer services. The Rice Collaborative Object Store adds an S3 compatible resource to on-campus cyberinfrastructure services, providing much needed capacity for multi-terabyte data, making that data available for local -or distant- computational analysis, sharing with distributed collaborations, or available for public access.

As the research computing and data applications expand across fields, there is a need to create opportunities for workforce development in the area of cyberinfrastructure. This project introduces students to the advanced computing ecosystem, providing training on local storage and compute resources, and user facilitation. These student trainees actively participate in research engagement with the collaborating use case groups to utilize this new resource and the Open Storage Network (OSN).

The Rice Collaborative Object Store node joins the production-level OSN, which is part of the nation’s growing federated data fabric. Providing low-cost, efficient services based on open-source software, the OSN has nodes at many of the national or regional advanced computing centers. The system consists of three compute nodes in a high availability configuration, 1.9PB disk, and Ceph storage software, connected at 100 gigabits from the Rice University ScienceDMZ network.

The resource contributes 20% of the available storage to the common OSN allocation pool that is available to researchers across the U.S.

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.