AUSTIN, Texas—The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at The University of Texas at Austin this week hosted the National Data Service (NDS) Consortium's third meeting, which included the first tutorial session introducing the capabilities of the NDS Labs facility.
The meeting of the NDS took place March 25-27 at TACC's main offices at the J.J. Pickle Research Campus and focused on growing the pilot projects, sharing the latest on funding efforts, and establishing the governance for the NDS Consortium. About 50 people including leaders from many national data repositories, data aggregators, community-specific data federations, publishers, data researchers, and cyberinfrastructure providers participated.
Ed Seidel, director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), said, "The most important thing we can accomplish this week is to maintain momentum and enthusiasm so people feel the consortium is valuable to the community."
NDS Labs, which launched earlier this year, is an environment where developers can prototype tools and capabilities that help build out the NDS framework and services. Users of this environment have access to significant storage, machines that can run services, and a variety of useful data management and manipulation tools (e.g. databases, storage management systems, repository applications).
Out of the one-day tutorial and two-day meeting came future potential projects and a further definition of what the NDS Labs will enable. NCSA, TACC, the San Diego Supercomputer Center, and a number of other institutions are collaborating on the deployment and support for this new service. "We hope NDS will grow into something that will become not just a hosting environment for people to develop services, but a place that creates and supports production level services for data centers," Seidel said.
In addition, the consortium introduced its first elected steering committee. Seidel is currently serving as the interim chair. This newly convened group met for the first time during this meeting.
The first day was an opportunity for participants to meet, develop, and plan for new and ongoing pilot projects using the fledgling NDS Labs. This tutorial allowed participants to be some of the first people to work within the NDS Labs environment, which allows developers to create services in flexible and transferrable environments leveraging virtualization and containerization technologies.
"We're here to inspire ideas that people can start working on in an experimental environment — that's at the heart of NDS Labs," said Ray Plante, NCSA senior research scientist and the interim program manager for NDS. "Any project that helps us understand what the NDS should be, what kind of services it should offer, and how to connect to all the data sources already in existence, such as connecting to disciplines with rich services in place, data publishing, discovery across multiple domains, and developing standards, is welcome."
"We're hoping that the participants can help us drive the direction and expand the capabilities and communities by identifying the things they think are useful and sharing them with others," Plante said.
According to Niall Gaffney, director of Data Intensive Computing at TACC, the NDS overall is also striving to find common needs and common goals amongst what some people might consider disparate fields of data driven research. "Spanning fields is difficult," Gaffney said. "You need to have a foot in both fields to be able to do that. We want people to get the data they need and the services they need without having to rely on an expert in some other field. Eventually, once we have enough support for spanning fields, we'll be able to bring together, say, climate information experts with researchers doing crop studies."
"Collectively and initially, we may have funding for smaller projects, but there's not a mothership," Seidel said. "Right now we're deciding to band together to write smaller proposals that specifically talk about the NDS. Since the last meeting there have been a number of projects that have been announced that deal with creating certain kinds of services."
For more information on the National Data Service, please visit: nationaldataservice.org.