Compute Canada, CARL establish national platform for research data management

Compute Canada and the Canadian Association of Research Laboratories (CARL) are partnering to build a scalable national platform to meet the growing need for data storage and management. The new platform has been successfully piloted and aims to close growing gaps in research data management when attempting to bridge systems and address scalability.

The National Platform Service brings together Compute Canada's demonstrated information technology expertise in advanced research computing (ARC) with CARL's Portage Network, which assists institutions with developing research data management (RDM) plans. The project's backers say the resulting platform will help Canada catch up with other nations and become an established leader in the field.

"Canada has been lagging due to the financing of RDM. It's treated as vertical investment, not a horizontal one so we've had to build this from the bottom up," says Chuck Humphrey, director the Portage research data management network. "This collaboration brings together the need for horizontal RDM with the major provider of advanced research computing in Canada that usually supports vertical research. We've leapfrogged up to par with other RDM nations and I'm hopeful this will position Canada as a leader."

Federated storage model

Dr Dugan O'Neil, Compute Canada's chief science officer, is a high energy physicist who has worked on the ATLAS experiment at CERN. He says most scientists, like the thousands who converge on CERN to conduct research, don't work in an RDM environment despite its importance to their work.

"We need to lower the barrier to doing RDM in an effective way. Policy and training is critical and CARL does this," says O'Neil. "The policies surrounding RDM require a very different approach."

Under the new platform, participating institutions supporting their own data repositories or storage arrays will be linked into a national system featuring specially designed software tools within defined privacy and control parameters.

"This will be a single large repository and web interface. Anyone can hook into the system. It's a system of federated repositories," says O'Neil. "When we buy new equipment it will include storage and be deployed in four centres (the Univ of Waterloo, Univ of Toronto, Simon Fraser Univ and Univ of Victoria) comprising a single national storage system."

Tools and services

CARL has already developed RDM tools and services to support curation, access, discoverability and preservation of research data and will provide these for the National Platform Service. The organization started working in the area of national services for research data in 2009 and now counts 29 of Canada's largest research libraries as members. The Portage Network was launch in May 2015 and the National Platform Service represents an opportunity to expand its reach.

"It allows us to reach a critical axiom of storage and be able to move data to different locations in Canada," says Humphrey.

"Portage has already introduced services for RDM planning. SSHRC (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council) and CIHR (Canadian Institutes of Health Research) are now engaged."

Need for RDM reaching critical stage

O'Neil says the need for RDM is becoming critical as researchers' demand grows for a common set of tools to manage data and several research initiatives involving Canadian researchers and requiring massive storage capacity and management gear up.

"On the storage side we have several fire hoses pointed at us," he says. "This is a two-year project ending in 2017 and we're inviting researchers to be early adopters — beta testers — from different disciplines.

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