Newswise — SC21, St. Louis, MO — November 16, 2021 — A broad coalition of collaborators including the Arecibo Observatory, the NSF Cyberinfrastructure the Center of Excellence Pilot (CICoE, now CI Compass), which includes the University of Southern California, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Notre Dame, the University of Utah, Indiana University, and Texas Tech; the Engagement and Performance Operations Center (EPOC) (which is a collaboration between Indiana University and ESnet), Globus at the University of Chicago, the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), and the University of Central Florida (UCF), received the HPCwire Readers’ Choice award for Best HPC Collaboration across Academia, Government, and Industry at the 2021 International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC21).
Within weeks of the Arecibo telescope’s collapse, the collaborators convened to transfer petabytes of irreplaceable observation data to a safe place in proximity to capability-class computing to foster analysis. These data represent over 50 years of astronomical observations from the telescope, which until 2016 was the world’s largest telescope.
The collaborators worked together with UCF, who has led the consortium that manages the Arecibo Observatory, which is a National Science Foundation (NSF) Large Scale Facility. Together the collaborators planned and moved the data to TACC’s Ranch system. The EPOC team provided the infrastructure skills and resources that were needed, and the CICoE Pilot/CI Compass team helped evaluate the data storage solutions and designed the future data management and stewardship experience to make Arecibo’s data easily accessible for further scientific research and discovery. Globus provided the managed transfer service to move terabytes of data daily, while carefully monitoring the transfers to ensure that no data was lost. The data migration was executed in coordination with Arecibo’s IT department, with assistance from the University of Puerto Rico and Engine-4, a non-profit coworking space and laboratory, who shared their internet infrastructure.
“This group of collaborators spanning across academia, government and industry, preserved decades of priceless data, and will enable us to achieve many new and exciting scientific discoveries,” said Tom Tabor, CEO of Tabor Communications, publisher of HPCwire. “Our readers understand the significance of this accomplishment, and we are proud to present this award to this esteemed group of research institutions.”
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