Speaker
Mr
Eric Yen
(Academia SINICA Grid Computing Centre, Taiwan)
Description
Digital archives/libraries are widely recognized as a crucial component of the
global information infrastructure for the new century. Research and development
projects in many parts of the world are concerned about using advanced information
technologies for managing and manipulating digital information, ranging from data
storage, preservation, indexing, searching, presentation, and dissemination
capabilities to organizing and sharing of information over networks.
Digital Archive demands for reliable storage systems for persistent digital
objects, well-organized information structure for effective content management,
efficient and accurate information retrieval mechanism and flexible services for
varying users needs. Hundreds of Petabyte of digital information has been created and
dispersed all over the internet since computers had been used for information
processing, and the amount still grows in the rate of tens of Petabyte per year. Grid
technology offers a possible solution for aggregating and processing diversified
heterogeneous Petabyte scale digital archives. Metadata-based information
representation makes specific and relative information retrieval more accurately,
makes information resources interoperable, and paves the way for formal knowledge
discovery. Taking advantage of advancing IT, semantic level information indexing,
categorizing, analyzing, tracking, retrieving and correlating could be implemented.
Data Grid aims to set up a computational and data-intensive grid of resources for
data analysis. It requires coordinated resource sharing, collaborative processing and
analyzing on huge amounts of data produced and stored by many institutions.
In Taiwan, a National Digital Archive Project (NDAP) was initiated in 2002 with
its pilot phase started in 2001. According to the record in 2005, more than 60
Terabytes digital objects was generated and archived by 9 major content holders in
Taiwan. Not only delicate and gracious Chinese cultural assets can be preserved and
made available via the Internet, but this approach could be proposed as a new
paradigm of academic researches based on digital and integrated information
resources. The design and implementation phase is ongoing and we would like to
illustrate in the EGEE User Forum.
Academia SINICA Grid Computing Centre (ASGC) is in charge of building a new
generation of Grid-based research infrastructure in Academia SINICA and in Taiwan
based on EGEE and OSG as the Grid middleware. This infrastructure is a major
component for the development and the deployment of the National Digital Archive
Project (NDAP) providing long-term preservation of the digital contents and unified
data access. These services will be built upon the e-Science infrastructure of
Taiwan. The Storage Resource Broker (SRB) developed at SDSC, is a Middleware which
enables scientists to create, manage and collaborate with flexible, unified "virtual
data collections" that may be stored on heterogeneous data resources distributed
across a network. The SRB system is the first and the largest (in terms of the data
volume) data store in Academia SINICA right now. The system was deployed by ASGC in
early 2004, which consists of 7 sites in different institutes, linked by a dedicated
fibre campus network, and provided 60 TB capacities in total. In early 2006, it will
expand to 120 TB. As of January 2006, more than 30 TB and 1.4 million files have been
archived in the distributed mass storage environment. All files are also preserved in
two copies on different sites.
In this presentation, idea for utilizing Data Grid infrastructure for NDAP will
be depicted and discussed. We will describe the use of SRB in building a
collaborative environment for Data Grid Services of NDAP. In the environment, many
data intensive applications are developed. We also describe our integration
experience in building applications of NDAP. For each application we characterize the
essential data virtualization services provided by the SRB for distributed data
management.
Author
Mr
Wei-Long Ueng
(Academia SINICA Grid Computing Centre, Taiwan)
Co-authors
Mr
Eric Yen
(Academia SINICA Grid Computing Centre, Taiwan)
Mr
Hui-Min Lin
(Academia SINICA Grid Computing Centre, Taiwan)
