26 February 2012

Reaganomics

It is very impressive actually - Reagan Moore running an iRODS tutorial session at the pre-ISGC2012 iRODS workshop and getting a whole room to install clients (and a few servers) and downloading files from RENCI in North Carolina. From the "other" grid perspective (ie SRM), ASGC's Hsin-Wei Wu presented work on developing an SRM interface to iRODS, like they previously developed it for SRB. We need to start interoperating these implementations and see what an information provider will look like - previously we had just static information providers for SRB, maybe we can do dynamic ones for iRODS.

Reagan asked the question whether there is an SRM backend for iRODS -- ie you have iRODS "on top" fetching data from an SRM storage element. This has, of course, been talked about before but there has never been a strong business case. Maybe now in the brave new world of multi- and interdisciplinary research, the case is stronger.

On the whole, it has been a very interesting tutorial - any tutorial which makes you want to go away and write code is surely a successful one :-)