DoIT Receives NSF Grant for Campus Cyber Infrastructure

Purpose: The Retriever Research Storage System, R-RSTOR, will enable UMBC researchers to address important research in atmospheric science, analyze polar ice caps, and develop AI models for human and robotic interactions. The system will support increased collaboration with the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science (UMCES) on research into the ecology of the Chesapeake Bay and its watershed, as well as the broader community access through the Open Science Data Federation. 

The Team: In collaboration with the Office of Research & Creative Achievement (ORCA), Information Systems (IS), and Computer Science (CS), DoIT is the Principal Investigator.

Award Amount:$498,122.00

Details: This system integrates with UMBC's existing High-Performance Computing Facility and Science DMZ to streamline interdisciplinary and inter-institutional collaborations. The additions to the system will allow researchers to enhance data mobility between on-premises and cloud environments, accommodating evolving computational requirements as more workloads shift to a hybrid cloud model. Utilizing the Ceph open source distributed file system, we will add approximately 2.5 petabytes of storage. We have ordered the equipment and expect that this will be operation by the end of 2024.

Big Picture: This is one piece of a large multi-million dollar investment in research computing infrastructure across multiple USM institutions. Work has already begun to implement and deploy new equipment and configurations to support research storage.