Go Globus: To Infinity and Beyond
January 10, 2020 | Mary Bass
(Originally published on University of Pittsburgh blog)
Research Reality: Research projects can include multiple collaborators, generate large amounts of data, include hundreds or thousands of participants/samples, and require significant computing resources for data storage, transfer, and analysis. The data needs to be shared, combined, and manipulated by researchers who may sit on the other side of a wall, across campus, or across the ocean from each other.
Plan for the Future: Now imagine that the project expands to include even more collaborators, or that it becomes accessible to other researchers or even the general public. It is critical that effective collaboration is facilitated among all research partners, including:
- Establishing what data partners can contribute, view, and edit
- Determining where/how data should be stored and organized
- Ensuring that all processes and protocols meet HIPAA regulatory standards
- Monitoring system and data activity by all collaborators
- Determining what data, reports, and results can be accessed by others and processing requests
While all of these tasks can become a monumental job that is time consuming and complicated, with the right research computing solutions, it can be easy.
Go Globus
Globus is a non-profit service for secure, reliable research data management. It’s been around for over 20 years and is the industry standard for data transfer in research computing. With Globus, subscribers can move, share, and discover data via a single interface. Whether your files live on a supercomputer, lab cluster, tape archive, public cloud, or your laptop, you can manage the data from anywhere, using your existing identities, with just a web browser.
Globus removes data management roadblocks and headaches by providing unified access to all storage locations—in short, Globus makes it much easier to work with data (even sensitive data requiring additional controls), while ensuring security and reliability. Researchers (and the IT teams who support them) can worry less about moving and sharing their data, authenticating new users, or connecting new storage systems, so that they can focus more time and energy on research.
Get the full story: https://www.technology.pitt.edu/blog/globus