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Versatile iRODS Data System Gains New Power in 2.1 Release

The Data Intensive Cyber Environments research group at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of California, San Diego has announced the release of version 2.1 of iRODS, the Integrated Rule-Oriented Data System. The award-winning open source software is a joint product of UNC’s DICE Center and the DICE group at UCSD’s Institute for Neural Computation.

Download of version 2.1, user information, and the release notes are freely available as open source software from the iRODS website http://irods.org.

“This release marks a new stage in iRODS development,” said Reagan Moore, DICE Center director, Chief Scientist for Data Cyber Environments at RENCI, and professor in UNC’s School of Information and Library Science (SILS). “With much of the core functionality for data applications already there, the 2.1 release focuses on implementation of additional features that have been requested by the iRODS user community.”

As a state-of-the-art data management system, the iRODS architecture and core functionality combine the interrelated generic capabilities required for a broad range of data applications, from building and sharing massive data collections, to publishing reference collections in digital libraries, and long-term archiving and preservation.

“The approach we use in iRODS continues more than 10 years experience working closely with users,” said Mike Wan, iRODS software architect. “This ensures that we’re creating software that meets the needs of real-world applications.”

Added Wayne Schroeder, iRODS product manager and core developer, “For example, iRODS 2.1 includes support for the popular MySQL database, contributed by a partner at SLAC (the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center), as a third option for running the iCAT Metadata Catalog, along with the PostgreSQL and Oracle databases.”

Version 2.1 also includes Kerberos authentication in addition to GSI and iRODS secure password, and new features for bundling small files for managing interactions with tape archives.

To enable users to take full advantage of the power of the innovative iRODS Rules and Micro-services, version 2.1 includes expanded documentation developed at UNC and additional micro-services that are useful for implementing preservation processes for NARA’s Electronic Records Archives Program (ERA).

As the iRODS open source community grows, more partners are now contributing code, speeding the development of the software. A new Resource Monitoring System developed at the French Institut National de Physique Nucléaire et de Physique des Particules (CC-IN2P3) in Lyon can help administrators more efficiently manage storage resources. Davis, a popular WebDAV extension that gives users Web-based drag-and-drop access to data collections in iRODS (and SRB) was contributed by the Australian Research Collaboration Service (ARCS).

Other collaborators in the iRODS project include the EU Sustaining Heritage Access through Multivalent ArchiviNg (SHAMAN) project and the University of Liverpool which collaborated on the specification of additional policy enforcement points within the iRODS framework; the UK e-Science Data Management Group at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory which collaborated on specification of compound resources for managing interactions with bundled files in tape archives; the Centre for e-Research at King's College, London which collaborated on integration of Shibboleth authentication; and the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization, KEK, in Japan which analyzed data transfer performance.

The DICE team is working with a number of projects to apply the technology, including the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) Transcontinental Persistent Archives Prototype (TPAP), the NASA Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS), the NSF Temporal Dynamics of Learning Center (TDLC), the NSF TeraGrid, the Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI), the NHPRC-supported Distributed Custodial Archival Preservation Environments (DCAPE) project, the French National Library, and many others.

In addition to Moore, the DICE Center includes Arcot Rajasekar, Director of Research and Technology; Richard Marciano, Executive Director; Software Architect Mike Wan; Product Manager and Core Developer Wayne Schroeder, along with Sheau-Yen Chen, Lucas Gilbert, Chien-Yi Hou, Antoine de Torcy, Paul Tooby, and Bing Zhu. The nonprofit Data Intensive Cyberinfrastructure Foundation serves as the home of the growing open source iRODS community.

iRODS is funded by the National Archives and Records Administration and the National Science Foundation under the following grants:

- NSF SDCI 0721400, "SDCI Data Improvement: Data Grids for Community Driven Applications" (2007-2010)

- NSF/NARA OCI-0848296, "NARA Transcontinental Persistent Archive Prototype" (2009-2012).