In the News

Argonne researchers and staff now have access to the Globus data management service. A number of storage systems at the lab are already enabled for Globus use, including Mira, Vesta and the tape archive at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (LCF); various systems at the Laboratory Computing Resource Center (LCRC) and Center for Nanoscience Materials (CNM); and several beamlines at the Advanced Photon Source (APS). Argonne researchers have used Globus for many years to replace cumbersome and error-prone file transfer mechanisms such as sftp and rsync.

At the SpectraSummit event in Boulder, Colorado, earlier this month, HPCwire learned of a developing partnership between storage vendor Spectra Logic and research software-as-a-service provider Globus to integrate Spectra's BlackPearl Gateway storage into the Globus Cloud, creating an endpoint for BlackPearl that effectively enables an archive tape system to be usable by the Globus community.

The Blue Waters team at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications announced that a new prototype Data Sharing Service (DSS) is now available for Blue Waters users to share data sets with their research community or the broader public. There are two classes of sharing based on the needs of the partners and data: active data sharing for projects with current allocations on Blue Waters, and community sharing for data produced by prior projects. Users from each group can share data using Globus sharing capabilities or a web service interface.

Using SaaS is commonplace in industry but only just starting to make inroads in higher education. This article describes the benefits of using SaaS in other areas on campus, in particular to manage the growing volumes of research data. Beyond time and cost arguments, SaaS can deliver advanced capabilities to many researchers that their campus IT would not otherwise be able to provide, thereby "democratizing" access.