CHAPEL HILL, NC – The iRODS Consortium welcomes Bayer, a global life science company with core competencies in the fields of health care and agriculture, as the latest consortium member.
Launched in 2014, the membership-based iRODS Consortium leads the development and support of the integrated Rule-Oriented Data System (iRODS) as free open source software for managing large, complex data. Bayer uses iRODS to manage life sciences data at large scale.
The advent of the genomics era brought a number of new challenges in scientific data management. Data volumes have increased dramatically, and the high information density of personal patient data requires high standards for data security, data privacy, and traceability of data flows. A system was needed which is able to handle distributed data at petabyte scale, which allows secure and fine-grained access control, and which manages rich metadata independent of underlying platforms. The iRODS technology addresses those needs and can manage large-scale genomic and molecular data in research and development.
“Similar questions need to be addressed at Bayer’s Crop Science Division”, said Thomas Schilling, Head of IT at Digital Farming. “With the need to handle high amounts of mostly geolocated data, we need the scalability, security, traceability and access control that the iRODS technology offers. In addition the metadata tagging allows us to create flexible adhoc data-marts to enable data driven research and development to further improve our offerings.”
The iRODS Consortium membership has doubled in the last year and now stands at 15. Other members are the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) and the Data Intensive Cyber Environments (DICE) Center at UNC-Chapel Hill, Seagate, DataDirect Networks, Western Digital/HGST, Panasas, IBM, the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, Complete Genomics, the National Institute for Computational Sciences at the University of Tennessee, University College London, EMC, Utrecht University, and NASA’s Atmospheric Science Data Center.
“Bayer’s membership in the iRODS Consortium means we will be better able to address the data challenges of life sciences enterprises,” said Jason Coposky, Interim Executive Director of the consortium. “We look forward to ongoing collaboration with Bayer and know they will be great contributors to our growing open source community.”
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.
