Research Data Storage Available to Researchers Throughout the U.S. via the TeraGrid

This is a preprint of a paper in the Proceedings of the 34th annual ACM SIGUCCS fall conference (2006). Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.Many faculty members at small to mid-size colleges and universities do important, high quality research that requires significant storage. In many cases, such storage requirements are difficult to meet with local resources; even when local resources suffice, data integrity is best ensured by maintenance of a remote copy. Via the nationally-funded TeraGrid, Indiana University offers researchers at colleges and universities throughout the US the opportunity to easily store up to 1 TB of data within the IU data storage system. The TeraGrid is the National Science Foundation's flagship effort to create a national research cyberinfrastructure, and one key goal of the TeraGrid is to provide facilities that improve the productivity of the US research community generally. Providing facilities that improve the capacity and reliability of research data storage is an important part of this. This paper will describe the process for storing data at IU via the TeraGrid, and will in general discuss how this capability is part of a larger TeraGrid-wide data storage strategy.U's involvement in the TeraGrid, and the presentation of this material, is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grants No. 0833618, SCI451237, SCI535258, and SCI504075. IU received a significant grant-in-kind as part of its initial deployment of the massive data storage system. The deployment of IU’s MDSS has also been supported by the Indiana Genomics Initiative and the Indiana METACyt Initiative, both supported through grants from the Lilly Endowment, Inc; by Shared University Research grants from IBM, Inc.; and by NSF grants 0116050 and 0521433