Targeted Serendipity: the Search for Storage
Wednesday, April 4th, 2012 by Josh PolterockOn the heels of our recent press release regarding fresh publications that make use of the UCSD Network Telescope data, we would like to take a moment to thank the institutions that have helped preserve this data over the last eight years. Though we recently received an NSF award to enable near-real-time sharing of this data as well as improved classification, the award does not cover the cost to maintain this historic archive. At current UCSD rates, the 104.66 TiB would cost us approximately $40,000 per year to store. This does not take into account the metadata we have collected which adds roughly 20 TB to the original data. As a result, we had spent the last several months indexing this data in preparation for deleting it forever.
Then, last month, I had the opportunity to attend the Security at the Cyberborder Workshop in Indianapolis. This workshop focused on how the NSF-funded IRNC networks might (1) capture and articulate technical and policy cybersecurity considerations related to international research network connections, and (2) capture opportunities and challenges for the those connections to foster cybersecurity research. I did not expect to find a new benefactor for storage of our telescope data at the workshop though, in fact, I did.