Speaker
Description
The Department of Aeronautics at Imperial College London is addressing the environmental and accessibility challenges of modern research by deploying a scalable repository architecture. This system integrates a custom InvenioRDM interface with Ceph object storage to manage massive computational datasets in alignment with FAIR principles. By leveraging software-defined storage on commodity hardware, the department avoids carbon-intensive "forklift upgrades," allowing for sustainable, incremental capacity growth.
The infrastructure features a self-healing, S3-compatible backend designed to eliminate "dark data" through domain-specific metadata curation. To reduce energy consumption associated with unnecessary network egress, the platform supports flexible retrieval, enabling researchers to inspect granular data subsets rather than downloading entire multi-terabyte files. Ultimately, this ecosystem prevents redundant, energy-heavy re-computations by transforming primary data into a permanent, reusable asset. The proposed talk details the lifecycle of this transition from ad-hoc management to an integrated, environmentally conscious research framework.