WORKSHOP 14: DESIGNING STORAGE SOLUTIONS FOR LIFE SCIENCES
Tuesday, April 5, 2016 | 12:30 - 4:00pm

ABOUT THIS COURSE:

During the Information Age, discoveries in our physical world began feeding an abstract electronic data universe. Consequently, scientific breakthroughs and achievements now trigger the formation of vast digital oceans with exponentially rising tides. There is no end in sight. Within this data abundance, a transition to the Analytics Age has begun, where advancements in Data Science promise to drive innovation and discovery for the foreseeable future. The speed of this transition has left most IT and research support organizations unprepared and unable to keep their storage and data management practices relevant. Most are in survival mode. Organizations that thrive in this new era will learn to understand their data’s true value and balance traditional storage best practices with targeted innovation. This comprehensive BioTeam workshop begins by framing the problem, highlighting needs, and outlining use cases for storage in life sciences. It next provides a thorough review of storage types, filesystems, networking considerations, and compute interactions. After covering service, management, and policy issues, this workshop will conclude with an interactive discussion.

COURSE AGENDA:

12:30 Introduction and Scope

• Introductions and Workshop Goal
• Scoping the Problem in Life Sciences
• Generalized Storage Needs in Life Sciences
• Use Cases for Storage in Life Sciences

1:30 Refreshment Break

1:40 Storage Types and Filesystems

2:40 Storage, Networking, and Compute Interactions

• Network, HPC, VM, and Server Farms
• Science DMZ with DTN Focus

3:10 Storage Services, Management, and Policies

• DLM, Data Commons, Metadata, Policies
• Relevant IT Services

3:40 Closing Discussion

4:00 Course Ends

INSTRUCTORS:

 Ari E. Berman, Ph.D., Vice President and General Manager of Condulting Services, BioTeam

Ari began his High Performance Computing career working for the Computer Science department at the University of Texas at Austin as an undergraduate in Biology and Zoology. While there he helped design and build several commodity medium-scale clusters as well as deploy, integrate and maintain large networks of mixed architectures. During this time he became an expert in Perl and shell scripting, learned about parallel programming techniques, and deployed several Web-based interactive programs. He entered graduate school at UT and received his Ph.D. in Molecular Biology with concentration in Neuroscience and Bioinformatics in 2005. In the two postdoctoral fellowships at UCSF and the Buck Institute for Research on Aging Ari gained laboratory experience in mouse model development and neurodegenerative diseases as well as a great deal of direct bioinformatics experience. During this time he continued developing and maintaining HPC infrastructure to assist in his research. Recently, Ari has gained expertise in disaster recovery, high-availability, data security, and centralized high-performance, high-volume storage systems. Ari’s career goals are to seamlessly combine his HPC and hardware infrastructure skills with his biology, bioinformatics, and software development skills to provide a mechanism to drive biological sciences into an age of advancement.

 Aaron Gardner, Senior Scientific Consultant, BioTeam, Inc.

With over a decade of insight into HPC and research infrastructure, Aaron serves as a Senior Scientific Consultant for BioTeam. Previously, as Dir. of the Uni. of Florida’s Interdisciplinary Center for Biotechnology Research (ICBR) Cyberinfrastructure (CI) team, he was responsible for the center’s computing and bioinformatics efforts, also serving as the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment Campus Champion. He earned a degree in Digital Arts and Sciences from the University of Florida.