Need to Take Control of Your Data? Visit iRODS in Booth 3628

SALT LAKE CITY, UTAH – Attendees of SC16 who are interested in open source data management will have plenty of opportunities to learn about the integrated Rule-Oriented Data System (iRODS) and the new iRODS 4.2, which will be released just in time for the conference.

iRODS, is free open source software for data discovery, workflow automation, secure collaboration, and data virtualization. A team of software engineers based at the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) at UNC-Chapel Hill develop iRODS and the software is sustained by the iRODS Consortium, a membership-based organization with 15 active members in the U.S. and Europe. SC16 attendees can visit the RENCI booth on the SC show floor (#3628) during regular exhibit hours to learn about what’s new in iRODS 4.2, hear case studies, and see demonstrations from iRODS developers and Consortium members. Free iRODS t-shirts will be available to conference participants who attend a presentation in the booth.

iRODS 4.2: Enhanced integration meets expert software engineering

The new iRODS 4.2 integrates best practices of iRODS Consortium members and the larger iRODS community and standardizes message formats and payloads. Highlights of the upgrade include:

• A Messaging Framework that allows iRODS to asynchronously reach out to external services via an Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) message bus. When combined with the new Rule Engine Plugin Framework, it creates a fine-grained, fast system for message dispatch.

• Support for reference implementations across a variety of use cases and vertical integrations. So far these implementations include: an auditing system of every operation within an iRODS deployment; an indexing system to handle partial and full-text indexing of data objects and metadata stored in an iRODS deployment; and metadata storage through an external service that can store large numbers of metadata attributes associated with data stored in iRODS.

• The aforementioned Rule Engine Plugin Framework that allows rules to be defined in multiple languages, such as C++ and Python. The framework also allows users to simultaneously run multiple rule engine plugins and rule bases, which in turn allows for the creation of special purpose rule engines. When used with the new messaging protocol, these special rule engine plugins can publish any or all policy enforcement points and associated data to the AMQP message bus for ingest or action.

Want more detail? Attend the free workshop

Those who want to dig deeper into iRODS 4.2 are encouraged to attend a free workshop sponsored by iRODS Consortium member DDN from 9 a.m. – 11 a.m. Monday, Nov. 14, in the Wasatch Room at the Radisson Hotel Salt Lake City Downtown, 215 S. Temple. To register, please visit http://irods.org/sc16/.

The workshop will include information about installing and upgrading iRODS and an overview of the consortium’s new use of APT and YUM repositories for managing software installation. Other topics to be covered include: composable resources, an iRODS feature that allows the user to encode data management policies in a decision tree; workflow automation, a process that encodes policies into machine-actionable rules; and rule engine plugins, the feature that allows users to write iRODS plugins in commonly used programming languages such as Python and C++.  A question and answer session will wrap up the workshop.

All workshop attendees will be expected to bring their own laptop with a Secure Shell (SSH) client. Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances will be provided for the workshop.

iRODS presentations and demos at the RENCI Booth

As home of the iRODS development team and the iRODS Consortium, the RENCI booth (#3628) on the SC16 show floor will feature a wide range of iRODS presentations. Presentation titles and times are listed below, but members of the iRODS development team and the iRODS Consortium will be available all day in the booth to answer questions.

Other iRODS presentations and Consortium members at SC16

iRODS Senior Data Scientist Terrell Russell will present iRODS and Reproducible Science at 5 p.m. on Wednesday, Nov. 16 in DDN’s SC16 Booth Theatre (Booth #1931) and in the Dell/EMC booth (#2209) at 1:30 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 17.  In addition, many iRODS Consortium members will have booths at the conference with information about how they use iRODS to control their data: HGST (#442), IBM (#1018), DDN (#1931), Seagate (#1209), EMC (#2209), and NICS/University of Tennessee (#3874).

About the iRODS Consortium

The iRODS Consortium is a membership organization that leads development and support 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 professional integration services, training, 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. For more information about RENCI, please visit www.renci.org.