HOLYOKE, Mass., June 25, 2018 — The Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center (MGHPCC) announced today that it will participate in a data storage network that will enable academic researchers to process and share data more efficiently across the country.  The Open Storage Network (OSN) is being funded by a $1.8 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF).

“The ability to easily store and retrieve vast amounts of data is central to scientific discovery and innovation today,” said John Goodhue, Executive Director of the MGHPCC.  “The OSN will support and encourage the kind of collaboration that can accelerate those discoveries and innovations both in our region and nationwide.”

The MGHPCC is one of five sites that will work together deploy a pilot network that will grow into the Open Storage Network.  The project, led by Alex Szalay of Johns Hopkins University, leverages key data storage partners throughout the U.S.  These partners include the National Data Service, along with sites representing each of the four NSF-funded Big Data Regional Innovation Hubs (BD Hubs) — the San Diego Supercomputer Center (West BD Hub), the National Center for Supercomputer Applications (Midwest BD Hub), the Renaissance Computing Institute (Southern BD Hub), and the Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center and Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (Northeast BD Hub).

“We are excited to support OSN to help meet the needs of researchers in today’s era of data-driven discovery and innovation,” said Erwin Gianchandani, acting assistant director of the Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate at NSF. “The OSN team and their supporting collaborators will build a community to multiply the impact of previous and current NSF investments and anchor comprehensive data infrastructure that will be vital to the future of our nation’s scientific and engineering enterprise.”

The OSN builds on a seed grant by Schmidt Futures – a philanthropic initiative founded by former Google Chairman Eric Schmidt – to enable the network’s high performance data transfer system, which will ensure that OSN can eventually be deployed at many universities across the U.S.  and enable them to leverage prior NSF investments in network and storage infrastructure developed for scientific research.  One such investment is the Northeast Data Exchange, an NSF-sponsored regional storage pool at the MGHPCC being developed by its members – Boston University, Harvard University, MIT, Northeastern University and the University of Massachusetts.

About the Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center

The Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center (MGHPCC) provides state-of-the-art infrastructure for computationally intensive research that is indispensable in the increasingly sensor and data-rich environments of modern science and engineering.  Computers at the MGHPCC run millions of virtual experiments every month, supporting thousands of researchers in Massachusetts and around the world.  The MGHPCC was developed through an unprecedented collaboration among the most research-intensive universities in Massachusetts (Boston University, Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Northeastern University and the University of Massachusetts); the Commonwealth of Massachusetts; and private industry (Cisco and EMC).  The member universities fund the ongoing operation of the data center, which is open for use by any research organization.

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Source: MGHPCC