Announcement

We had the pleasure of meeting this month’s honored users in person at the XSEDE13 Conference in San Diego last month. Brian Leu, Parth Sheth, and Albert Liu are all undergraduates at the University of Michigan. Brian answered my questions about how they use Globus Online to manage their undergraduate research data. We couldn't be happier that Globus Online has helped them continue their research over the summer--and that they've never known the difficulties of moving research data in the pre-Globus era!

We just crossed the 10,000 mark for registered users and it made me think of the early days of Globus Online. Our first users were Shreyas Cholia, David Skinner, and others from NERSC, a very supportive group that helped us troubleshoot and refine pre-release versions of the file transfer service.

It is my pleasure to announce that we have selected Vadim Roytershteyn as the user of the month for May 2013.

Vadim is a plasma physicist at SciberQuest, Inc., where he uses large-scale simulations to study a variety of processes in laboratory, space, and astrophysical plasmas. He primarily works with so-called fully kinetic simulations, which use computational particles to represent plasma species (such as electrons and ions). Such simulations are very attractive because they provide essentially first-principle description of plasma under fairly general conditions. At the same time, fully kinetic simulations generate a very large amount of data, which can be challenging to deal with. 

I am happy to announce that the user of the month for January 2013 is Ann Syrowski from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Ann is a Research Professional in the Atmospheric Science department's Convective Modeling Group. She develops numerical simulations of severe storms using the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model and several HPCs throughout the country. Ann has moved more than 100 TB of data using Globus Online—50 TB in the past month alone—among a variety of HPC resources including XSEDE resources, NCSA's mass storage system, and PSC's data archiver.

It is my pleasure to announce that the user of the month for December 2012 is Kurt LaButti from the Department of Energy's Joint Genome Institute.

Kurt has been in the genomics industry since 2001. He started at what is now the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT working on the human genome. He performed closure on chromosomes 17 and 11. He then transitioned into bioinformatics and assembly analysis, working primarily on fungi and virus genomes. At the Joint Genome Institute, he assembles and analyzes data from the DOE community, sequencing relevant organisms. His group handles microbes, metagenomes, fungi, and other interesting projects. 

ESnet (Energy Sciences Network) has deployed three anonymous read-only GridFTP servers for testing purposes. These GridFTP servers are available as endpoints on Globus Online: esnet#anl-diskpt1, esnet#bnl-diskpt1 and esnet#lbl-diskpt1. Globus Online users can use these endpoints for testing purposes. Since these endpoints allow anonymous access, you do not need a username and password to access them. It should be noted that you can only read data from these endpoints and not write data to them.

Earlier this week at the SC12 conference we announced a set of new services that we plan to launch early in 2013, including a simple, fast way to share big data directly from your own storage (without moving it to a cloud storage provider). We also announced that some of these future services will have a monthly fee associated with them, in keeping with our objective to make Globus Online a self-sustaining effort. We've received positive feedback on our development plans, as well as many questions, and I'd like to further expand on our announcement.

Our mission is to serve the data management needs of researchers at academic and non-profit institutions. In order for us to do this effectively, we must be able to sustain our operations—a task that is not easy to do within the traditional research funding environment. Federal agencies continue to support our core research through grants, but these grants are not intended to fund operating costs for things like cloud hosting resources, user support staff, and helpdesk software, among others. Our goal is to charge a modest fee to those researchers and projects who receive substantial value from our service, not so that we can make money, but so that we can sustain Globus Online over the long term.

I am pleased to announce that the user of the month for October 2012 is Dmitry Ozerov from DESY in Germany.

Dmitry has a background in particle physics research and is currently working as an IT data management specialist in the Scientific Data Management and Grid Computing team at DESY, Hamburg. The team manages 7.5 petabytes of disk and 4 petabytes of tape storage, and the batch facility for the scientists from the High Energy Physics and Photon Science.

I am happy to announce that the user of the month for September 2012 is Kenneth Aird from University of Chicago.

Ken is a software engineer at the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at University of Chicago where he manages the local computing resources, data storage, access, and backup for the South Pole Telescope. The South Pole telescope is the largest telescope ever deployed at the South Pole. It is designed to study the Cosmic Microwave background and explore dark energy, the phenomena that may be causing the expansion of the universe to accelerate. The collaboration currently has about 250TB of telescope observation data and intermediate data products. Ken is using Globus Online to archive all of this data – as well as data from ongoing observations and analysis – to the High Performance Storage System (HPSS) at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC).