Speaker
Alan Tackett
Description
Protein analysis, imaging, and DNA sequencing are some of the branches
of biology where growth has been enabled by the availability of
computational resources. With this growth, biologists face an
associated need for reliable, flexible storage systems. For decades
the HEP community has been driving the development of such storage
systems to meet their own needs. Two of these systems - the dCache
disk caching system and the Enstore hierarchical storage manager - are
viable candidates for addressing the storage needs of biologists.
Both incorporate considerable experience from the HEP community.
While biologists have much to gain from the HEP community's experience
with storage systems, they face several issues that are unique to the
biological sciences. There is a wider diversity in experiments, in
number and size of datafiles, and in client operating systems in
biology than there is in HEP. Patient information must be kept
confidential. Disparate IT departments set up firewalls that separate
client systems and the storage system.
Vanderbilt University is developing a storage system with the goal of
meeting biologists' needs. This system will use Enstore for its
robustness and reliability, and will use the flexible door-based
architecture of dCache to provide storage services to biologists via
web-portal, the dCache copy command, and custom applications. This
system will be deployed using an automated tape library, several
secure central servers, and nodes placed near biologists' existing
compute infrastructure to ensure locality of caches and secure data
channels between researchers and the central servers.
Primary author
M. Calef
(VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY)
