EUDAT Safe Data Replication Service Ready

The EUDAT project aims to establish a collaborative data infrastructure across Europe to serve the needs for common data services required in different scientific user communities. The first EUDAT service is now ready for production after roughly one year of preparation by the Safe Data Replication Service Task Force under the leadership of JSC.

The service guards scientific "big data" against data loss in long-term archiving and preservation by replicating datasets across EUDAT members, and also optimizes the data access especially for those groups of scientists that share the same multi-GByte, -TByte or even -PByte datasets. Each replicated data object can be identified with a persistent identifier (PID) to support the process of permanently identifying the same dataset in different storage and file systems. This helps to avoid unnecessary duplication of large datasets, which with "big data" have become a more serious issue, and it also enables unique data references (e.g. for publications).

The service is also a convenient way of bringing "big data" closer to powerful supercomputers at JSC and its European partners for compute-intensive data analysis. The service is currently used by large scientific communities, such as the European Plate Observatory System (EPOS), the European Network for Earth System Modeling (ENES), and the Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure (CLARIN).
(Contact Morris Riedel, m.riedel@fz-juelich.de)

from JSC News No. 210, 25 February 2013