SDSC Launches Data Central

Published 08/01/2005

Today, the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) launched Data Central, the first program of its kind to support a number of large community data collections and databases. In addition to providing hosting and long-term archiving, Data Central will allow users to make their data collections publicly available to a wide community of potential users.

"We are excited to launch this new and groundbreaking data allocations program, which is now available to the U.S. academic research community," said Natasha Balac, data applications group lead at SDSC. "Our Data Central site is designed for the academic researcher who understands the importance of collaboration and wants to make his or her data collections available to others to utilize."

Interdisciplinary collaborations and the community-shared data created are becoming increasingly important to the progress of science. To support these endeavors, SDSC has made available to users a number of data storage resources, tools and expertise. With storage facilities offering more than one Petabyte of online disk and six Petabytes of archival tape storage, SDSC currently hosts more than 50 publicly available data collections, including many that have not been publicly available until now. Collections recently made available (or have plans to become available) to the scientific community include bee behavior videos as well as data from the Library of Congress.

One of the most vital community databases hosted at SDSC is the Protein Data Bank (PDB), a worldwide repository for the processing and distribution of 3-D biological macromolecular structure data run by the Research Collaboratory for Structural Bioinformatics (RCSB). The PDB supports an enormous number of accesses, requires 24/7 reliability and is central to progress in many biological sciences.

Eligible researchers can request a data allocation from SDSC (with or without a compute allocation) that permits expanded access to SDSC's Data Central facilities for data collection hosting, database hosting and long-term archiving. These capabilities make it possible to share the data from computations or specialized data collections with colleagues. To request a data allocation, fill out the simple, fast online form, which can be submitted automatically online.

To learn more, log on to the Data Central site at http://datacentral.sdsc.edu/.