First open source release of E-iRODS announced by RENCI

RENCI announced this week the release of E-iRODS 3.0, the first open source release of E-iRODS software to be managed and overseen by the iRODS Consortium, an alliance of organizations working together to fund and guide the continued development of the iRODS/E-iRODS platform.

iRODS—or integrated Rule-Oriented Data System—was developed by the Data Intensive Cyber Environments Group at UNC Chapel Hill and the University of California at San Diego. It is a popular data grid infrastructure that allows data to be viewed, shared and managed as a single collection with support for metadata. E-iRODS is a branch of the iRODS platform designed to be as stable, robust and supported as commercial software. RENCI leads the development of E-iRODS.

The 3.0 release is the result of a cooperative effort to provide updated, reliable iRODS software that has been tested extensively on RENCI’s open infrastructure to assure reliability. The new release is feature compatible with iRODS 3.0 and includes bug fixes from  iRODS 3.1 and 3.2.

In addition to the assurance of reliability, E-iRODS 3.0 contains the addition of pluggable microservices and composable resources. This makes it an even more useful tool for researchers managing large amounts of data. The resource plugins also provides a common interface for different types of data, allowing them to be compiled and shared when viewing as a whole. In addition, the E-iRODS team has increased testing code coverage to over 56 percent, which is run continuously in the E-iRODS continuous integration facility.

The new version also fixes an estimated 200 static analysis errors and an estimated 20 memory leaks. E-iRODS 3.0 has been continuously tested across three major open source Linux operating systems: CentOS 5 and 6; SuSE 11 and 12; and Ubuntu 10 and 12.

Following this release, the iRODS Consortium will continue to work to provide a non-competitive environment to fund and guide the development of E-iRODS, accelerate and streamline its adoption, and ensure the technology is stable and relevant for its adopters.

To download the new E-iRODS 3.0 software, go to http://eirods.org/download.