SC16 attendees will have the chance to attend a free workshop on using iRODS.

IRODS: From Prototype to Production will be sponsored by DDN

SALT LAKE CITY, Utah – Attendees of SC16 who are interested in federated data management will have the chance to learn about iRODS and the iRODS Consortium at a free workshop sponsored by consortium member DDN.

The workshop will take place from 9 a.m. – 11 a.m., Monday, Nov. 14, in the Wasatch Room on the second floor of the Radisson Hotel Salt Lake City Downtown, 215 S. Temple. To reserve a seat at the workshop and view more information, click here.

iRODS—the integrated Rule-Oriented Data System—is free open source software for managing large, complex data that is often distributed at multiple locations. iRODS is developed and sustained by the iRODS Consortium, a worldwide group of iRODS users representing industry, academia, and government. At the Nov. 14 workshop, Jason Coposky, iRODS chief technologist and interim director of the iRODS Consortium, and Terrell Russell, iRODS senior data scientist, will present an overview of the consortium and its roadmap for continued iRODS development before delving into the nuts and bolts of working with iRODS.

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.

“This workshop is an overview designed to give people more in-depth information about the iRODS data management platform and provide an overview of features, enhancements, and plans for the future,” said Coposky. “It will give SC attendees with a need for secure data management the chance to learn about what we’ve been doing for the past year and how we can meet their needs.”

iRODS Consortium membership now stands at 15, including the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI), home of the iRODS development team and the iRODS Consortium, and the Data Intensive Cyber Environments (DICE) Center, the UNC-Chapel Hill institute that works with RENCI and the consortium on iRODS development. Other consortium members are Seagate, Bayer, 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.

The iRODS development team will also offer ongoing presentations and demonstrations in the RENCI booth (#3628) at SC16. Stop by the booth to talk to the development team, hear about use cases, and earn the chance to win an iRODS Consortium t-shirt.

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.