PetaShare is an NSF sponsored project which responds to the urgent need of scientists who work with large-scale data generation, sharing and collaboration requirements. PetaShare aims to enable domain scientists to focus on their primary research problem, assured that the underlying infrastructure will manage the low-level data handling issues.
PetaShare employs a very novel approach to solve the distributed data sharing and management problem. Unlike existing approaches, PetaShare treats data storage resources and the tasks related to data access as first class entities just like computational resources and compute tasks, and not simply the side effect of computation. The key technologies that are being developed in this project include data-aware storage systems, data-aware schedulers, and cross-domain metadata scheme which take the responsibility of managing data resources and scheduling data tasks from the user and perform these tasks transparently.
An initial prototype of PetaShare is deployed at seven Louisiana campuses: Louisiana State University, Tulane, Louisiana Tech, Univ of New Orleans, Univ of Louisiana at Lafayette, LSU Shreveport, and LSU Health Sciences Center in New Orleans. The system manages 300 Terabytes of disk storage distributed across the state as well as 400 Terabytes of tape storage. It leverages 40 Gigabit per second Louisiana Optical Network Initiative (LONI) infrastructure to make the interconnections, fully exploiting high bandwidth low latency optical network technologies.
PetaShare links more than fifty senior researchers and two hundred graduate and undergraduate research students from ten different disciplines to perform multidisciplinary research. Application areas supported by PetaShare include coastal and environmental modeling, geospatial analysis, bioinformatics, medical imaging, fluid dynamics, petroleum engineering, numerical relativity, and high energy physics.