Ketan Mane, left, and Phil Owen with their Health IT Innovation Awards presented by NCHICA

Chapel Hill, May 9, 2013 – Tuesday, May 7, marked the first annual Health IT Innovation Awards sponsored by the North Carolina Healthcare Information and Communications Alliance (NCHICA). RENCI had a strong presence at the awards event, held at the Friday Center in Chapel Hill, and walked away with the top award for health IT innovation in the research applications category.

The research applications Health IT innovation award went to RENCI’s NCGENES project team. First, I want to congratulate Phil Owen, RENCI Research Software Architect and a key member of the NCGENES project team. NCGENES is an informatics framework that systemizes genomic analysis in order to mine genomic data for better healthcare decisions and research uses.

Phil Owen, RENCI research software architect, accepted the award for the RENCI team, which includes co-principal investigator Kirk Wilhelmsen, also with the UNC genetics department, Chris Bizon, Erik Scott, Josh Sailsbery, Dylan Young and Jason Reilly. Other lead investigators on the NCGENES project are Jim Evans, Bryson Professor of Genetics and Medicine at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, and Jonathan Berg, an assistant professor in the UNC genetics department.

Another RENCI project led by Senior Research Scientist Ketan Mane was selected as a finalist in the research applications category. The project is a collaboration with the Duke University School of Medicine that uses data from an Electronic Medical Records database of more than 2 million psychiatric patients at the point of care to help clinicians make more informed, targeted treatment decisions for their patients.

“We applaud the exemplary work these organizations are doing to improve health and healthcare,” said Holt Anderson, executive director of NCHICA. “ “It is through these types of innovations that we will transform the U.S. healthcare system with improved clinical outcomes.”

NCHICA is a nonprofit consortium dedicated to assisting its members in accelerating the transformation of the U.S. healthcare system through the effective use of information technology, informatics and analytics. The awards ceremony was sponsored by Intel, the North Carolina Technology Association (NCTA), the North Carolina and Georgia chapters of the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS),  Carolinas HealthCare System, CDW and the Duke Center for Health Informatics.

Read NCHICA news release on the award winners:

Read more about the winners and their innovations

Eric Green, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, talks about the impact of the Human Genome Project at the first NCDS-sponsored public event. Watch the full lecture at https://vimeo.com/65393300.

Members strategize on making U.S. and North Carolina leaders in the global, data-driven economy

Chapel Hill, NC – A new collaboration called the National Consortium for Data Science (NCDS) aims to make North Carolina a national hub for data-intensive business and data science research and education, a move that will help develop a national strategy to ensure U.S. leadership in the data-driven global economy.

The consortium, launched at RENCI, the Renaissance Computing Institute at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, unites data researchers in academia with data creators and users in business and government. Together they will address the challenges related to collecting, sharing and using large, diverse data collections, or big data. The NCDS will look at ways to harness big data as an economic engine, such as developing data-centric businesses, conducting multidisciplinary data science research and supporting new data science education programs.

“Those who harness the power of big data and use it to develop new data-intensive business sectors will be the winners in the 21st century economy,” said Stanley C. Ahalt, Ph.D., director of RENCI and a chief organizer of the NCDS, and professor of computer science at UNC-Chapel Hill. “Our members understand that, want to find solutions to big data problems and put North Carolina on the map as a center of data science innovation.”

NCDS founding members include industry leaders, major research universities, and nonprofit and government organizations. Representing the private sector are Cisco, GE, IBM, NetApp and SAS. UNC Chapel Hill, RENCI, North Carolina State University, UNC Charlotte, UNC General Administration, Duke University and Drexel University comprise the founding academic members.  Nonprofit and government sector members are The Hamner Institutes for Health Sciences, MCNC, the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, RTI International and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. All founding members have major facilities in North Carolina except Drexel, located in Philadelphia.

Big data refers to the large, multidimensional data sets that are used and created every day by scientists, engineers, consumers, social media users, financial institutions, hospitals and clinics and more. These big data include electronic medical records, medical images, financial and business transaction records, and scientific data ranging from genomic sequences to models used in meteorology to data collected by telescopes and environmental sensors.

In February, the NCDS held its inaugural meeting and agreed to the following initiatives in year one:

• Capitalize on member strengths to compete for federal data science research funding, including the $200 million Big Data Research and Development Initiative announced by the White House last year, the National Science Foundation’s BigData program, and the National Institutes of Health’s Big Data to Knowledge initiative.
• Convene the first invite-only NCDS Leadership Summit April 23-24 in Chapel Hill. Each year, the summit will focus on data issues in a specific field. The 2013 summit, Data to Discovery: Genomes to Health, will bring together genomic and data scientists to draft recommendations on how to translate genomic data into better, more affordable healthcare.
• Host a public lecture by Eric Green, M.D., Ph.D., director of the National Human Genome Research Institute and acting director of the new National Institutes of Health Data Science program. Green will speak at 10 a.m. Tuesday, April 23, at the Friday Center for Continuing Education in Chapel Hill just before the start of the Leadership Summit.
• Launch a Data Fellows program that provides internships for students at member companies and visiting scientist positions at member universities for industry employees.

““It is no longer enough for businesses to be big in order to be successful, now success is driven by the amount of knowledge a company possesses,” said David Turek, vice president, exascale computing, IBM. “Ninety percent of our planet’s data has been created within the past two years, and the demand will grow as businesses look to optimize big data analytics to improve decision making and expand their business operations into cloud, social and mobile environments.”

For more information on the NCDS, visit www.data2discovery.org.

For more information on the public lecture by Eric Green, visit http://data2discovery.org/public-lecture/

Media Contact:

Karen Green, RENCI
919.445.9648 (office)
919-619-8213 (mobile)
kgreen@renci.org
@renci
@thencds

UNC’s Topsail supercomputer comes out of retirement with a RENCI makeover from Erik Scott (left) and Mark Montazer (right).

In its prime, the UNC supercomputer called Topsail had a peak performance of nearly 30 trillion calculations per second—more than enough to earn a spot on the biannual Top500 supercomputers list.

That was in 2007, and as anyone familiar with Moore’s law knows, constant improvements in computing hardware mean a short life for even the most powerful high performance machines.

By 2012, Topsail, housed at UNC’s Information Technology Services in the ITS Manning Building, was destined to become surplus. After six years of helping UNC researchers conduct computationally intensive work in the biosciences, medicine, environmental sciences and other fields, its 530-plus nodes of dual quad-core processors were slow and outdated compared to newer models of parallel computers.

Erik Scott talks to students at UNC about the re-location and installation of the Topsail supercomputer in the Genome Sciences building in Chapel Hill.

But Topsail found a new lease on life thanks to resourceful computer engineers at RENCI, who gave the aging hardware the geek equivalent of a makeover.

“Topsail was about to be surplused, but the RENCI informatics group had the idea of refurbishing and reconfiguring it as a machine for big data problems,” said Erik Scott, a senior research software developer at RENCI.

Scott and RENCI Systems Specialist Mark Montazer set to work last August transforming Topsail from a supercomputer with separate file servers and processors into one that integrates processing and file serving. That integration, said Scott, makes data input and output (I/O) much faster and creates a machine well suited for handling data-intensive problems.

All parallel supercomputers divide their computing jobs into many mathematical problems and distribute different parts of the problem to the computer’s different nodes. While computationally intensive computing jobs—such as climate modeling, modeling complex biological systems, or astrophysics research—require parallel processing on many different, complex mathematical problems, data-intensive computing generally involves performing the same kind of calculation over and over on the computer’s nodes. Because the datasets are huge, fast I/O is essential to perform the same analysis on long streams of data.

A new home and a new lease on life

Analysis of genomic sequencing data is the perfect example of data-intensive computing. For that reason, Topsail was relocated from ITS Manning to the Genome Sciences Building, where it is easily accessible to researchers studying the relationship between genetic variance and disease.  Using the new “Son of Topsail” UNC researchers can now process genomic data sets 200 to 400 times faster than on a high-end desktop computer, according to Scott.

“From a math standpoint, the problem that genomic scientists deal with is very straightforward, but there is a huge amount of data to process,” said Scott. “Between the public genomic databases and the sequencing that’s been done here, UNC has about 35 trillion base pairs (the building blocks of DNA’s double helix) and that number is constantly growing.”

UNC's Topsail Supercomputer

The new Topsail has been used to analyze sequenced genomes in a study of genetic variants that might influence a person’s susceptibility to substance addiction, led by Kirk Wilhelmsen, MD, PhD, RENCI’s chief scientist for genomics, and a professor in the UNC School of Medicine’s neurology and genetics departments. It also enables the North Carolina Clinical Genomic Evaluation by NextGen Exome Sequencing (NCGENES) project.  NCGENES, which involves researchers at the School of Medicine and RENCI, aims to develop a system that will quickly processes and analyze patients’ genomic data to determine their risks for genetic diseases and improve clinical treatment. Jim Evans, MD, PhD, and Bryson Professor of Genetics and Medicine at UNC’s School of Medicine, leads the NCGENES project.

The revamped computer also caught the attention of Don Smith, a UNC Computer Science professor who teaches a course on systems designed for big data problems called Data Center Systems and Programming.

Smith needed a computing resource that would allow his students to work with Hadoop, a popular software framework used to support distributed, data-intensive applications. The class had been using a very small cluster, but the chance to use Topsail allows students to work on larger data sets and on problems similar to what they would encounter in professional business and research settings.

“Having access to a cluster of this scale is a great opportunity,” said Smith. “It gives the students the chance to do work that is very similar to something they would do in industry.”

The computer science students will begin using Topsail for their final projects when classes reconvene after Spring Break. Smith said they will be encouraged to tackle big data problems related to their interests, including genomics, medical imaging and Web analytics.

March 13, 2013 — La Mirada, CA — Project ADAMANT, a collaborative effort of the University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute (USC/ISI), RENCI at UNC Chapel Hill and Duke University, has been honored by the Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California (CENIC) as the recipient of the 2013 Innovations in Networking Award for Experimental/Developmental Applications.

Workflows, especially data-driven workflows and workflow ensembles, are becoming a centerpiece of modern computational science. However, scientists lack the tools that integrate the operation of workflow-driven science applications on top of dynamic infrastructures that link campus, institutional and national resources into connected arrangements targeted at solving a specific problem. These tools must (a) orchestrate the infrastructure in response to application demands, (b) manage application lifetime on top of the infrastructure by monitoring various workflow steps and modifying slices in response to application demands, and (c) integrate data movement with the workflows to optimize performance.

Project ADAMANT (Adaptive Data-Aware Multi-domain Application Network Topologies) brings together researchers from RENCI, Duke and USC/ISI and two successful software tools to solve these problems.  The software tools employed are Pegasus workflow management system and ORCA resource control framework, developed for NSF GENI. The integration of Pegasus and ORCA enables powerful application-driven and data-driven virtual topology embedding into multiple institutional and national substrates (providers of cyber resources, like computation, storage and networks).

Project ADAMANT leverages ExoGENI, an NSF-funded GENI test bed, as well as national research and education network providers of on-demand bandwidth services, specifically, National LambdaRail (NLR), Internet2 (I2), and the Energy Sciences Network (ESnet), and existing Open Science Grid computational resources to create elastic, isolated environments to execute complex distributed tasks. This approach improves the performance of these applications and, by explicitly including data movement planning into the application workflow, enables new unique capabilities for distributed data-driven “Big Science” applications.

Innovations in Networking Awards are given annually by CENIC to highlight exemplary innovations that leverage ultra high-bandwidth networking, particularly where those innovations have the potential to revolutionize the ways in which instruction and research are conducted or where they further the deployment of broadband in underserved areas.

This project is funded by the National Science Foundation Office of CyberInfrastructure (OCI) under award #1245997.

About CENIC

California’s education and research communities leverage their networking resources under CENIC, the Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California, in order to obtain cost-effective, high-bandwidth networking to support their missions and answer the needs of their faculty, staff, and students.  CENIC designs, implements, and operates CalREN, the California Research and Education Network, a high-bandwidth, high-capacity Internet network specially designed to meet the unique requirements of these communities, and to which the vast majority of the state’s K-20 educational institutions are connected.  In order to facilitate collaboration in education and research, CENIC also provides connectivity to non-California institutions and industry research organizations with which CENIC’s Associate researchers and educators are engaged.

Media Contact:

Janis Cortese

Publicity and Communications Manager, CENIC

(818) 823-3677

jcortese@cenic.org

Voluminous is a tool developed to assist in visualizing volumetric scalar fields—three dimensional fields that associate a scalar value to every point in the field. Voluminous has been used to help chemists view the nodes in a field that separate its positively and negatively charged regions. It was originally developed to visualize computational chemistry electron density fields, where the input volume represents the difference between two scalar fields.

However, other scientific research that require the interpretation of the difference between fields can also benefit from using these visualization techniques, such as meteorological research that visualizes scalar fields for temperature, humidity, pressure and other variables.

“We think that Voluminous can be an effective tool for understanding the properties of a wide range of volumetric data sets in physics, chemistry, computational fluid dynamics, and other fields where researchers need to discover and interpret information about different scalar fields,” said Tilson. “We hope to engage a community of users and enable them be more productive.”

Long term, the RENCI team plans to release Voluminous as an open source tool. More information, examples, and instructions for downloading Voluminous is available in the visualization section of the RENCI website.

CHAPEL HILL, NC – Ashok Krishnamurthy, PhD, director of research and scientific development at the Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC), will join the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) at UNC Chapel Hill as deputy director on Feb. 1, RENCI Director Stan Ahalt, PhD, announced today.

Krishnamurthy is also an associate professor in the computer and electrical engineering department at The Ohio State University and served as OSC co-interim executive director from September 2009 to August 2012. His work has focused on building engagements with the academic research community across Ohio, developing and expanding the center’s economic development mission, and developing and sustaining a robust statewide cyberinfrastructure to support OSC academic and industrial clients.

As deputy director of RENCI he will take responsibility for many similar functions, said Ahalt, including managing and enhancing research partnerships with faculty at UNC Chapel Hill, Duke University and North Carolina State University, building relationships between RENCI and Triangle area businesses, and leading efforts to bring new federal research funding to RENCI and its partner institutions.

“Ashok has built a reputation for working successfully with stakeholders involved in a diverse, university-based technology research organization, including faculty researchers, administrators, funding agencies, government and the business sector,” said Ahalt. “As a manager, he knows how to recruit, motivate and retain the kind of experts RENCI needs to thrive. He will be a tremendous asset to RENCI, UNC, and the North Carolina research community.”

Krishnamurthy worked closely with Ahalt during his tenure as OSC executive director (2004 – 2009) and played a crucial role in establishing OSC’s successful industrial outreach initiative called Blue Collar Computing. The program targets small and medium-sized businesses that lack high performance computing  (HPC) resources, providing them with the training, expertise and advanced technology tools they need to enhance their companies’ competitiveness. He also helped develop and deploy cyberinfrastructure that allows researchers to easily access and use computing and storage resources at OSC, including OSC On-demand, a remote interface that provides access to a variety of services and applications, and Data Import Storage and Collaboration (DISC), which allows users to easily access, analyze and store large data sets from scientific instruments.

Before his work at OSC and OSU, he served as the academic lead for the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) High Performance Computing Modernization Program in the Integrated Modeling and Test area. He has designed and provided numerous training courses for DoD User Groups on all aspects of the MATLAB programming language.

“RENCI offered me an opportunity I couldn’t pass up,” said Krishnamurthy. “With its roots at UNC, its close connections to three of the top research universities in the world, and its location in the technology-rich Research Triangle area, there is a tremendous opportunity to be involved in projects that have a lasting impact. I am honored to bring my enthusiasm, energy and years of experience to RENCI and to play a role in its continued success.”

Krishnamurthy holds PhD and master’s degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Florida and a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology. His areas of expertise include HPC, cyberinfrastructure, data exploitation, HPC in industry, American competiveness initiatives, signal and image processing and software development.

Download a photo of Ashok Krishnamurthy

Visualizing dune elevation on the Outer Banks. This image shows in a single, compact view how dune elevation changed between 1996 and 2008 in a section of the Outer Banks from Oregon Inlet on the north to Hatteras Island on the south. Orange bars show mean elevation within blocks of land along the Outer Banks and yellow bars represent variation in the elevations. Red points denote areas where elevations were below 3 meters, which correlates to where dunes have been washed out. The patterns of changes before and after storms can be studied by looking at variations in the bar heights

It takes no more than watching the news to realize that homes and businesses along the U.S. East Coast face dangers from erosion, floods and monster storms.

Although North Carolina escaped most of the havoc caused by Hurricane Sandy, its Outer Banks constitute a vulnerable strip of land. The region’s fragile natural environments and popular tourist attractions are battered every year by tropical storms, nor’easters, and winds that erode beaches, shift sand dunes, degrade dune ridges, wash out roads, and sometimes threaten peoples’ lives and homes.

A North Carolina State University research team works to understand the dynamics of Outer Banks terrain using data on land elevation, sea levels, and coastal development and innovative visualization techniques developed through a collaboration with RENCI.

“We are providing quantitative research to support understanding of what is happening with this coastal terrain over time,” said Helena Mitasova, PhD, an associate professor in the NC State Department of Marine, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences (MEAS). “Visualization helps us get more get more insight from the data. It makes it easier to communicate our results.”

Mitasova and Laura Tateosian, PhD, a research assistant professor with the Center for Earth Observation at NCSU, began working with RENCI senior research data visualization software developer Sidharth Thakur, PhD, about two years ago through the RENCI at NC State Faculty Engagement Program in Applied Scientific and Information Visualization.  The project involved analyzing a variety of data sources on coastal North Carolina, including digital elevation models (DEMs) derived from high-resolution LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) remote sensing surveys, aerial photography from the National Agricultural Imagery Program, U.S. Geological Survey data that uses transect lines running perpendicular to the coast to divide the region into segments, and data about the human impact on the Outer Banks derived from Chamber of Commerce occupancy receipts and National Park Service visitor counts.

The researchers wanted to examine changes to the terrain over time, and to compare those changes with significant events such as Hurricanes Isabel (2003) and Irene (2011). Because they needed to combine different kinds of data and wanted to include time as a variable, standard visualization techniques were inadequate. The team developed holistic visualizations that used glyphs—small visual objects such as dots or cones—and color over a series of time steps and interactive, exploratory visualizations to show phenomena such as changes in dune ridgeline elevation before and after Hurricane Isabel, instances of dune overwash in the Rodanthe area from 1999 to 2011, and changes in the region’s popularity with tourists and how that relates to terrain changes and weather events.

Visualization of ridgeline elevation in a vulnerable section of the Outer Banks. This set of images show elevations and changes in elevation along the Outer Banks north of Rodanthe township. The top figure shows a time profile of elevations, with elevation represented by size of spheres or glyphs. Red spheres mark areas where the ridgeline was decimated by storms (for example, in 2003, when Hurricane Isabel hit the coast). The bottom figure shows changes in ridgeline elevation relative to the previous time step and offers an alternative view of the dynamics of the ridgeline. The gray ‘fins’ are parallel to the ground plane and represent the lateral migration of dunes relative to their median positions over all the time steps. The visualizations show a significant shift in dune elevation and position after Hurricane Isabel. CLICK TO ENLARGE IMAGES

Capturing both space and time

“The Outer Banks is a long, narrow geographical area and with Sid’s help, we’ve been able to represent that large spatial area, as well as time, in one image,” said Tateosian. “That’s a much more effective way to look at our data than to compare a whole series of single images.”

She said that visualizing the same geographical area over time steps that cover years allows the researchers to spot trends and to better understand the causes of coastal erosion. For example, by looking at ridgeline elevations before, during and after Hurricane Isabel, they can determine if elevations were already declining before the hurricane, how the storm affected the ongoing changes, and whether to expect continuing ridgeline declines after the storm.

It’s the kind of information that could help scientists understand the effects of coastal storms, waves and winds in a vulnerable area facing rising sea levels. The knowledge gained from the work could also help city planners and developers as they decide where to locate resorts or subdivisions, or aid emergency managers in determining whether to order a coastal evacuation.

“Sid was an enormous help in bringing fresh ideas to visualizing coastal terrain changes,” said Tateosian. “Traditional techniques represent distinct aspects of the data in individual images and make pairwise comparisons.   That’s fine if you simply want to see if a dune is smaller this year than it was last year, for example.  But what if you want to look at the long-term trend over five years or 10 years?  It would become very difficult to compare the terrain features of a particular area over time—let alone a large stretch of beach over time. “This systems accounts for both the spatial element and the changes to terrain that occur over time.”

Mitasova hopes the visualization collaboration, funded in part by the Army Research Office and RENCI, will seed additional funding to study the dynamics of Outer Banks terrain. Her research plans include analyzing known vulnerable regions for patterns and adding new metrics to the analysis. Similar visualization techniques could be used to study the dynamics of other vulnerable terrains, such as mountainous regions that are prone to landslides, she said.

The research team looks forward to using a new visualization lab being built in the College of Natural Resources Center for Earth Observation, which will make their visualizations more accessible to other researchers and give more scientists the opportunity to learn about the techniques used in the RENCI collaboration. The researchers also plan to take their data into the NC State Social Computing Room, a RENCI facility planned for the D. H. Hill Library that will feature a floor-to-ceiling desktop on all four walls and will facilitate collaboration around large complex data sets.

“Working with RENCI really helped us get this project moving forward quickly and helped us think about our data in new ways,” said Mitasova. “There’s more to do, and we hope we can continue collaborating.”

Photo credit hburrussiii

CHAPEL HILL, NC – Julian Wooten holds degrees in biology and chemistry from UNC-Chapel Hill, and nanomedicine from UNC Chapel Hill’s Eshelman School of Pharmacy, and recently decided to pursue an MBA.

But it was prestigious teaching internships at Philips Exeter Academy and Johns Hopkins University that led him to become an entrepreneur and launch a company called Students and Teachers Employing New Criteria in Learning, or STENCIL. The company develops software that allows teachers and school administrators to manage data on student attendance, behavior and course performance. The cloud-based toolkit helps school officials spot patterns and predict if a student is at risk of dropping out of high school.

“During my teaching internships, I saw how much teachers have to do during a typical day,” said Wooten. “I started to think about how to help them manage their load and help their students.”

As a trained scientist, Wooten set out to create software that would use empirical data to combat the dropout problem. STENCIL, which he launched with fellow UNC alumnus Cameron Musler, mines student data looking for trends and patterns and alerts teachers and administrators when the data shows patterns that are consistent with a high risk of dropping out.

“For every four students that begin high school, one won’t finish,” Wooten explained. “So we really wanted to launch this program to save our schools from crisis. Our software is designed to spot problems before they become critical, before they result in another student deciding to leave school.”

STENCIL has attracted the attention of both educators and the Triangle business community. In October, STENCIL was selected for mentorship by the Blackstone Entrepreneurs Network, a program that identifies and nurtures high-potential innovations coming out of Triangle area universities. The network works with up to 30 startups every year, providing needed connections to the entrepreneurial community and expert advice on everything from attracting venture capitalists to marketing.

This past summer, The Institute for Emerging Issues at North Carolina State University selected Wooten as a finalist for the North Carolina Emerging Issues for Innovation Prize and the company was selected to join Carolina Launch Pad, the pre-commercial incubator for UNC technology startups housed at RENCI.

Not the type to rest on his laurels, Wooten also set out on a statewide tour of entrepreneurial meetings over the summer, presenting his business model and his dream of making an impact on education.

This January, The North Carolina School for Science and Math will test the STENCIL software. In the fall of 2013, Wooten plans to launch a larger pilot program.

Through participation in Carolina Launch Pad and the partnerships and learning opportunities made possible by the Blackstone Entrepreneurs Network, Wooten says he anticipates a year of growth and opportunities for STENCIL.

“I am very excited about the future of STENCIL and about our opportunity to provide tools that will improve our educational system.”

For more information:

STENCIL: www.stencilventure.com

Carolina Launch Pad website

Blackstone Entrepreneurs Network website

Carolina Launch Pad and RENCI support the Innovate@Carolina Roadmap, UNC’s plan to help Carolina become a world leader in launching university-born ideas for the good of society. To learn more about the roadmap, visit http://innovate.unc.edu.

Download photo of STENCIL CEO Julian Wooten

SALT LAKE CITY, Nov. 5, 2012 – A new consortium to be formed by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and members of the Max Planck Society, Germany’s most successful research organization, will work to develop a popular open source data management solution called the integrated Rule-Oriented Data System (iRODS) into a sustained, production-quality technology for data management, sharing and integration.

Plans to establish the Enterprise iRODS (E-iRODS) Consortium will be introduced at SC12, the annual international conference of high performance computing, networking, storage and analysis. Demonstrations and information will be available in the RENCI/North Carolina booth on the SC exhibit floor (3640) and at an event Wednesday evening, Nov. 14, at the Salt Lake Marriott Downtown at City Creek. That event will feature representatives of RENCI, the Max Planck Society, the Data Intensive Cyber Environments (DICE) group at UNC Chapel Hill, and iRODS users such as NASA, the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and Distributed Bio.

iRODS, developed by the DICE groups at UNC Chapel Hill and the University of California, San Diego, provides researchers in academia and government labs with distributed, policy-based data management technologies. In 2011, RENCI (UNC’s Renaissance Computing Institute) began working with the DICE group to develop E-iRODS, a branch of the iRODS software that is easier to use, simpler to integrate into commercial enterprises, backed up by extensive testing, and provides the support, security, and ongoing bug fixes usually associated with commercial software.

Through the planned E-iRODS Consortium, UNC Chapel Hill and its partners at the Max Planck Society seek to bring together universities, research organizations, businesses, and government agencies to guide the continued development of E-iRODS, obtain funding to support that development, and broaden the iRODS/E-iRODS user community. The consortium’s vision is to build E-iRODS into an open source data management system with the robustness, stability, documentation and development cycle of commercial software—a critical need for researchers and businesses as data sets grow larger and data sharing and access become more challenging.

The E-iRODS Consortium will be managed by an executive director and chief technologist based at RENCI. Software development and documentation teams at RENCI and the Max Planck Society will produce well-tested, production-quality software for deploying iRODS data management systems, supporting applications that depend on iRODS technologies, and for extending iRODS technologies.

“This consortium has the potential to benefit all iRODS users by creating a framework that supports the kind of development, testing and support usually associated with commercial software,” said Reagan Moore, head of the DICE team that developed iRODS, domain scientist for data management at RENCI, and a professor in UNC Chapel Hill’s School of Information and Library Science. “When it is up and running, we look forward to working with the consortium to expand and enhance our software and to build a broader iRODS user community.”

E-iRODS Consortium at SC12

Participants in SC12 interested in learning more about the E-iRODS Consortium are encouraged to attend the presentation “Enterprise iRODS and the E-iRODS Consortium,” in the RENCI/North Carolina booth (3640) at 1:30 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 13, or 10:30 a.m. Wednesday, Nov. 14, or to stop by the booth any time during the week to discuss E-iRODS and the E-iRODS Consortium.

Additionally, an informational reception about iRODS and E-iRODS will be held from 5 p.m. – 7 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 14, in the Solitude Room at the Salt Lake Marriott Downtown at City Creek, 75 S. West Temple, across the street from the Salt Palace Convention Center. Veteran iRODS users will talk about their data challenges and how iRODS helps them and representatives of the DICE group, RENCI, and the Max Planck Society will be on hand to talk about iRODS, E-iRODS and membership in the E-iRODS Consortium. Hot and cold hors d’oeuvres and a cash bar will be available.

“SC12 will be our first chance to talk to research communities about their data challenges and how they could benefit from being involved in the E-iRODS Consortium,” said Charles Schmitt, director of data initiatives at RENCI. “We invite any group looking for data solutions—whether they are current iRODS users or not—to attend this reception.”

For a full schedule of events in the RENCI booth, see the RENCI@SC12 booth schedule (RENCI SC12 Booth Schedule PDF)

More information:

E-iRODS website

RENCI website

Max Planck Society website

iRODS wiki

Media Contact: Karen Green, 919-619-8213, kgreen@renci.org