Renaissance Computing Institute

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NARA TPAP

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Visualization & Collaborative Environments

Completed Projects

NARA Transcontinental Persistent Archive Platform

Overview
The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) Transcontinental Persistent Archive Platform (TPAP) is a data preservation environment using the Storage Resource Broker (SRB) and "/i/ Rule Oriented Data Systems" (iRODS) data grid technology to develop, implement, and test a seamless, nationwide data management infrastructure. The NARA data grid was recently extended to include the University of North Carolina as its sixth node. RENCI provides data management infrastructure for the NARA data grid. Each data grid node manages its own preservation environment, with separate metadata catalog and storage systems. The UNC NARA node enables the university to federate with other NARA nodes on the grid in Washington D.C., West Virginia, California, and Maryland, and with the SRB zone of the Odum Institute for Research and Social Science at UNC-Chapel Hill, in order to test distributed data preservation technology. The data grid environment and the federation of SRB zones allows synchronization of collections (data and metadata) across grid nodes and offers replication services that support reliable distributed data preservation. The iRODS rule engine, in development and testing as the successor to SRB, offers the original SRB services along with rule-based support for implementation of administrative data management policy, even of data which is distributed across disparate administrative domains.

The RENCI Contribution
RENCI is collaborating with the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) and NARA's office of Electronic Records Archives (ERA) on the testing of the persistent archive platform and the tools and policies which support it. Researchers are examining the construction of advanced data management systems used to support long-term, cross-platform, multi-site preservation of distributed data. RENCI also collaborates with the UNC School of Information and Library Science (SILS) and the Odum Institute for Research and Social Science, testing their integration of social science data in VDC/DataVerse with the TPAP/iRODS data grid.

The RENCI system which serves as the UNC NARA node was implemented as a 32-bit virtual machine on a 64-bit architecture for compatibility with the SRB MCAT server. The prototype RENCI NARA zone is a replication mirror for NARA ERA collections. RENCI experts will continue to contribute to the testing of the new iRODS technology to support the transcontinental prototype for replication and maintenance of NARA collections.

Funding
The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA)

Collaborators
Jon Crabtree, Odum Institute for Research and Social Science, UNC
Cal Lee, School of Information and Library Science, UNC
Helen Tibbo, School of Information and Library Science, UNC

San Diego Supercomputer Center
Reagan Moore
Richard Marciano
Arcot Rajasekar
Michael Wan
Wayne Schroeder
David Minor
Christopher Jordan
Sheau-Yen Chen

University of Maryland
Joseph Jaja
Mike Smorul
Mike McGann

National Archives and Records Administration
Mark Conrad
Richard Lopez

RENCI Project team
Leesa Brieger, project leader
Matt Bidwell

Links
http://www.archives.gov/era/

Presentations
Reagan Moore, Society of American Archivists Annual Conference, August 2006
Reagan Moore, et all, TeraGrid07 All Hands Meeting, June 2007