CHAPEL HILL, NC, January 11, 2016 – The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), a facility that provides scientists with some of the world’s most powerful computing resources to enable discoveries, is the latest organization to join the iRODS Partner Program, the iRODS Consortium announced today.  

The iRODS Partner Program connects people who have data management challenges with organizations that can help solve them. All iRODS Partners have extensive experience with iRODS, the integrated Rule Oriented Data System, as deployed in production environments.

TACC, based at The University of Texas at Austin, designs, deploys and operates a wide range of high performance computing systems used by thousands of scientists each year to study problems in biology, medicine, environmental sciences, nanomaterials, astrophysics and much more.  iRODS, free open source data management software used by research and business organizations around the globe, is an important component of the services TACC provides through its Corral data management system and the Wrangler system, a computing environment for data-intensive applications provided though the National Science Foundation’s XSEDE initiative.

“TACC uses iRODS to support research data management, dissemination, and reporting activities which are increasingly crucial to the research enterprise, and with the Wrangler system, we expect to be at the forefront of development and deployment of exciting new capabilities based on the iRODS technology and associated software products,” said Chris Jordan, manager of the Data Management and Collections group at TACC. “As such we are excited to be a part of the iRODS Partner Program. We appreciate the opportunity to learn from and to share experiences with other institutions using iRODS in similar capacities, and to help those who may just be getting started with research data management and iRODS to learn this exciting technology.”

TACC joins Daystrom Technology Group, Distributed Bio and Metadata Technology North America as members of the iRODS Partner Program, which was launched in July 2015.  In addition to the Partner Program, the iRODS Consortium provides support to users through its engineering staff, particularly for cases that require advanced interaction with the iRODS code base. The iRODS Partner Program expands on these support capabilities with options for domain-specific and enterprise-grade service.

“TACC is an exciting addition to the Partner Program,” said Dan Bedard, executive director of the iRODS Consortium. “With years of iRODS experience, they already support a number of important production-level deployments that manage substantial amounts of research data. TACC is a world-class center with a reputation for responsive, effective user support.  Researchers from a broad range of scientific domains can be assured they will have the support and assistance they need by working with our partners at TACC.”

The iRODS Partner Program has two levels of participation. Gold partners are Consortium members, and they provide support that leverages training and fallback assistance from Consortium staff. Standard partners, including TACC, have registered with the Consortium as solution and service providers with iRODS experience. To learn more about the iRODS Partner Program or to contact a partner, see http://irods.org/partners/.

About the iRODS Consortium

The iRODS Consortium is a membership organization that supports the development of the Integrated Rule-Oriented Data System (iRODS), free open source software for data discovery, workflow automation, secure collaboration, and data virtualization. The iRODS Consortium provides a production-ready iRODS distribution and iRODS training, professional integration services, and support. The world’s top researchers in life sciences, geosciences, and information management use iRODS to control their data. Learn more at irods.org.

The iRODS Consortium is administered by founding member RENCI, a research institute for applications of cyberinfrastructure at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.