Colloquium next week: Data and Data Services at TACC

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Clik here to view.© Niall Gaffney/TACC

The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) has been at the forefront of High Performance Computing for over a decade. During this time, many researchers have entered the era of "Big Data". While not entirely new in astronomical environments, the scale, diversity, and fluid nature of data research have created many challenges in supporting these research areas. TACC has created a diverse environment to support the needs of the computationally diverse data fields. In addition to computational and storage resources, we have also developed several components to enable data research and computations for user environments ranging from data gateways and portals to integration within languages more familiar to data researchers such as R and Python. In this talk, I will give a high level overview of the systems at TACC, including Stampede, the number 8 HPC system in the world, and Wrangler, a data system leveraging a 600 TB NAND Flash based storage system to accelerate analytics. I will also discuss how these systems are integrated to create a powerful and flexible environment for data research, and how rich APIs, such as the iPlant developed Agave API, acts as the foundation of many data systems at TACC to create powerful computational portals and gateways that enable data research across the wide spectrum of research projects at TACC.