Recent Advancements in iRODS Technology Enable Global eResearch Collaboration

Mr Dave Fellinger¹

¹iRODS Consortium, Chapel Hill, United States

Requirements for managing large data collections led to government funding of a research project in 1995 that eventually became the Integrated Rule Oriented Data System (iRODS). The user community grew and in 2013 the iRODS Consortium was formed as a funded development organization supported by the community. The iRODS technology is metadata driven and it has been used to maintain discoverable collections by many research organizations. Federation was used by some groups such as the European Union Data Organization (EUDAT) to allow over 25 research institutions to share data across the EU within legal constraints.

The demand for even broader collaboration has driven the latest iRODS feature set. First is worldwide file locking. While file systems have locks on open files, iRODS virtualizes various disparate file systems. Utilizing iRODS locking, a file that has been opened for write access is locked to other users until the file is written and closed. This assures that another user in any location will never see stale data. To further enable collaboration the iRODS S3 interface has been improved to the point where it is faster than native cloud interfaces allowing efficient data transfer and sharing. Beyond that, a connector was written for Globus which is a popular endpoint service used by many research sites. Finally, a development partnership was launched with OMERO allowing microscopy users to share data based on metadata on a worldwide basis. The iRODS technology is community driven and development goals have expanded to accomplish global data sharing.

Biography:

David Fellinger is a Data Management Technologist and Storage Scientist with the iRODS Consortium. He has over three decades of engineering experience including film systems, video processing devices, ASIC design and development, GaAs semiconductor manufacture, RAID and storage systems, and file systems. He attended Carnegie-Mellon University and holds patents in diverse areas of technology.