San Diego Supercomputer Center Implements CAS From Caringo

Caringo Inc. announced an ambitious project by the San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of California San Diego to bring Redlining grids to UC campuses which are stored in a Caringo CAStor cluster.

The implementation has started with a CAStor clustered storage pool that is initially tasked with archiving The Redlining Archives of California’s Exclusionary Spaces (T-RACES). The project brings the history of red-lining from the shelves of the National Archives and puts it online in digital format. Using a Caringo archive as primary storage and keeping all data on a single tier of storage gives UC researchers and others easy access to digitized information, including maps, interviews, financial documents, and detailed city surveys from the 1930s and 40s.  

Caringo’s CAStor software eliminates performance and scalability limitations of conventional clustered storage systems by virtualizing storage across internal disks on every node and providing a vast 128-bit flat address space. CAStor clusters easily scale from Terabytes to Petabytes using commodity server hardware with self-managing capabilities along with automated replication and archiving features that minimize administrative effort.

“When designing a project of this scale that will be used across UC campuses, we had to consider a storage infrastructure that would be highly scalable and easy to use," said Richard Marciano, director of SDSC’s Sustainable Archives and Library Technologies Lab. “There is a lot of interest in interoperability between storage infrastructures and we have found a way to cross-register the red-lining content and CAStor. CAStor’s ease of local replication, storage-policy based retention, and wide-area replication through sets of rules makes it very flexible and attractive.”

The T-RACES project will be one of the first to utilize the new Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (HASS) Grid, a cyber-infrastructure initiative organized by the UC Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI). It will eventually provide researchers across all UC campuses with shared access to rare historical documents and other information dating back more than 70 years. The HASS Grid along with CAStor and other key software tools brings new analytical capabilities to collaborate with colleagues, produce more accurate conclusions and publish their findings into a digital library.