Libraries and CARC join to preserve research data

The University of New Mexico Libraries and the Center for Advanced Research Computing jointly acquired an enterprise storage system and compute virtualization platform. The system preserves and curates data, including books, journals, and scholarly data, such as data generated by computational research.

CARC and UNM Libraries both support the storage, analysis, and curation of scholarly data as part of their core missions, and CARC has historically hosted a portion of the library system, said Prof. Patrick Bridges, Professor of Computer Science and CARC Director.

“Since both the Libraries’ EMC storage system and the CARC storage systems needed refreshing at the same time and they serve similar missions, we decided to collaborate to deploy a joint system that supported both of our needs,” Bridges said.

The initial system, which is housed both at CARC and UNM Central IT, includes approximately 700TB of usable storage and six nodes for hosting virtual machines that support research and other forms of scholarly computing.

This increased storage will enhance Libraries’ ability to support the preservation and publication of research data and CARC’s ability to support the research and analysis of such data, Bridges explained. Specifically, it will house user home directories and project research directories for CARC high-performance computing systems, the Libraries’ LoboVault institutional repository, other library-hosted data repositories, and dedicated big data research projects such as a nascent 100TB medical imaging database to support research in forensic anthropology.