Date and time

Thursday 2 October 2008, 13:30 - 17:00

Description

Registration fees for this workshop are being met by ARCS. There is no cost to attend; however space is limited.

The Australian Research Collaboration Services (ARCS) Data Fabric is an easy to use way for researchers or groups of researchers to store and share their data. End users will be able to easily and transparently obtain access to a minimal quantity of storage resources without needing to invest financially or technically. It supports either the command line or GUI interfaces. Web interfaces will be available as well. Researchers wishing to purchase additional storage or storage features may do so as well and this will be available as part of the ARCS data fabric.

Who should attend

This workshop would be useful for anyone interested in using or finding out more about the ARCS data fabric. The workshop is aimed at researchers who need a place to store data to be part of a workflow or to collaborate with others, for example.

Outline

This workshop will cover an introduction to the data fabric, what it is, how to gain access to it and policies for using it.

Attendees will be shown demonstrations of the technologies behind the data fabric including:

• Storage Resource Broker (SRB)
• GridFTP
• The Hermes desktop data transfer tool

Other technologies will also be demonstrated.

Existing applications and use cases will be discussed.

Attendees will be able to try out some of the examples themselves and interact with the workshop staff in discussing how their own use cases could make use of the features of the ARCS Data Fabric.

What to bring

To participate in the interactive part of the workshop attendees should bring laptops capable of wireless networking. Java 1.5 or later and an ssh client should be installed. Apart from that the operating system is not important. Attendees should email data@arcs.org.au if there are any further questions about these requirements.

About the presenters

Stephen McMahon is a member of staff at the ANU Supercomputer Facility where he works with providing data services for large data projects and coordinates the ARCS data services team. He has been working with data and grid activities for several years now. He holds a Masters in Aerospace Engineering from UNSW, ADFA and a Bachelor of Science with honours from ANU.

Florian Goessmann is a staff member of Curtin University of Technology, fully seconded to iVEC to work as a member of the ARCS data movement team. He has been heavily involved in the planning and deployment of the ARCS Data Fabric since its beginning. Florian holds a Masters in Physics from Curtin University of Technology.

Pauline Mak completed her Bachelor of Science with Computing Honours at the University of Tasmania. She is a member of staff at the Tasmanian Partnership for Advanced Computing (TPAC) and is also part of the ARCS Data Collaboration Services team.

Shunde Zhang is a member of staff at the South Australian Partnership for Advanced Computing where he works on various data projects and is a member of the ARCS data services team. He is also working towards a PhD degree in Data Grid at University of Adelaide's Department of Computer Science.

Kai Lu is a member of ARCS Data Services team and works at University of Queensland as a Data Grid Analyst for ARCS Data Fabric project. He received his B.Eng. degree from the Tian Jin University of Technology, China, M.Eng. degree from University of New South Wales, and Ph.D. degree from University of Sydney, all in Computer Science. He has published multiple academic papers in the area of parallel and distributed computing. His research interests lie in the area of large-scale distributed systems, specifically in the topics of resource management and middleware development in Grids.

Joseph Antony is a member of staff at the ANU Supercomputer Facility where he works on large data projects and is a member of the ARCS data services team. He is also working towards completing a part-time PhD at ANU's Department of Computer Science. He holds a Masters in Applied Science from RMIT University and a Bachelor of Science from Bangalore University.

Mathew Wyatt is a Software Engineer at the James Cook University e-Research Centre. He has worked with the Australian Institute of Marine Science, Dataset Acquisition Accessibility & Annotation e-Research Technologies (DART), and more recently on Australian ResearCH Enabling enviRonmet & Annotation e-Research Technologies (ARCHER). He is the lead developer of Hermes, a flexible desktop application for data and metadata management. Mathew holds a BIT (Bioinformatics, HONS) from JCU.