Mark your calendars for these upcoming People Network virtual meetings. (For handy calendar entries please try the CaRCC Events Calendar.)
Data-Facing Track (first Tuesdays)
Tuesday, July 7, 1p ET/ 12p CT/ 11a MT/ 10a PT
What data to keep? — Making decisions about confocal microscopy data
Presenters: Huajin Wang, Librarian/ Program Director for Open Science & Data Collaborations, Carnegie Mellon University Libraries and Susan Ivey, Research Data & Infrastructure Librarian, NC State University Libraries
As the quantity and volume of data produced by research increases exponentially, it has become increasingly challenging to preserve and reproduce data. Traditionally, researchers have often created their own workflows and their own data storage solutions, but this is no longer sustainable, making collaborations and data sharing challenging. On the other hand, data librarians are tasked with helping researchers share and preserve their data, but understanding specific types of data and how to maximize reuse can be difficult. Large and complex data exist in a variety of disciplinary areas, and one example is confocal microscopy data. In April 2019, the Data Curation Network held their 2nd Data Curators Workshop at Johns Hopkins University. Susan Ivey, Amy Koshoffer, Gretchen Sneff, and Huajin Wang formed a group to address many of these issues associated with confocal microscopy data. During this July’s Data-Facing Call, we’ll go into detail about common workflow and challenges that researchers face when working with confocal microscopy data and give an overview of our “Confocal Microscopy Data: A Primer for Curators,” which we created to help those tasked with curating this type of data. We’ll also present some of the use cases that we used to inform this work and invite the audience to think about how to best preserve and share these data.
Researcher-Facing Track (second Thursdays)
Thursday, July 9, 1p ET/ 12p CT/ 11a MT/ 10a PT
Big Data, Big Compute Solutions, a community discussion
Whether working at home or in the office, working with large datasets or compute problems presents many challenges. Storage, coding practices, workflows, and compute resources, to name a few, all play a large part in how we handle “big” problems. So we’d like to hear from you on successes, or not, of how you are approaching or have approaching them. In part 1 of this 2-part series, we’d like to focus on traditional compute setups — desktops and HPC systems. What are your coding practices, approaches for optimization, and how do you scale?? We’d also like to discuss workflows and design patterns that you’ve attempted, and found success or not. In part 2 (a future call), we’ll shift our focus slightly, and discuss transitioning to cloud, and how these discussion points and paradigms have or need to change.
Systems-Facing Track (third Thursdays)
Thursday, July 16th, 1p ET/ 12p CT/ 11a MT/ 10a PT
OURRstore: Big Data on a Small Budget, discussion facilitated by Henry Neeman, Patrick Calhoun
The data tsunami is upon us: transformative research is increasingly data-intensive, with collections in TB to PB, and Exabytes (EB) coming soon. Projections of research storage growth show that, by 2025, research data will outstrip even YouTube. Yet many institutions are underprepared not only for the “volume, velocity and variety” of data, but especially for stewardship of exponentially growing collections. The University of Oklahoma (OU) has been awarded a National Science Foundation grant that has acquired, and will deploy and maintain, for 8+ years, a large scale storage resource — the OU & Regional Research Store (OURRstore) — to enable faculty, staff, postdocs, graduate students and undergraduates to pursue data-intensive research, by building large and growing data collections, to share these datasets with collaborators and even the public, and to provide this capability to all institutions in (a) the Great Plains Network and (b) Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) jurisdictions. Via an innovative, low cost business model, researchers will buy their own tape cartridges, good for 8+ years, and pay zero usage charges (just cartridge and shipping costs). OURRstore is expected to have hundreds of users.
Emerging Centers Track (third Wednesdays)
Making Policy, discussion facilitated by TBD
Wednesday, July 15 12pm ET/ 11am CT/ 10am MT/ 9am PT/ 7am HT
In July the Emerging Centers track will talk about making center policies: Usage, users, security, and your other topics. We’ll be developing a survey where you can record your suggestions and questions for center policy development and sharing the results with the Emerging-Centers track.
Interested members of the People Network need not subscribe to a particular track to participate in calls. Additional details for track members, including notes documents and any pre-call activities, will be distributed ahead of the call via the email lists and other communication channels within each track.
The CaRCC (Campus Research Computing Consortium) People Network, aims “to foster, build and grow an inclusive community (termed the “People Network”) for campus CI, research computing and data professionals.” If you have received this email NOT via CaRCC’s People Network, and you would like to join the People Network, which includes Researcher-facing, Data-facing, Systems-facing, and other tracks, please fill in the form at http://bit.ly/join_carcc_people_network.
All calls will take place within the same Zoom room distributed via email. Please join the People Network (link just above) or contact help@carcc.org for details.