James Cook University has adopted the University of Queensland-developed data storage fabric, MeDiCI, as the replacement for its end-of-life storage infrastructure.
MeDiCI (Metropolitan Data Caching Infrastructure) is responsible for the seamless transfer of data between caches at JCU, UQ and offsite data centres, so researchers do not need to manually transfer data.
MeDiCI delivers ultra-fast multi-site data access on demand without user involvement, saving researchers valuable time to focus on their work.
MeDiCI was seen as a clean mechanism to have data stored, and replicated for resilience, in one place, with active data readily accessible to analysis environments, both at JCU and more broadly across QRIScloud’s cloud and high-throughput computing infrastructure.
MeDiCI enables JCU to manage and scale the size of its local cache for active data collections, while allowing MeDiCI to manage data transfers, with QRIScloud’s back-end infrastructure taking care of the replication and storage for all research data brought into MeDiCI.
JCU will leverage its MeDiCI cache to present active data to its local high-performance computer for analysis, whilst allowing the same data to be presented to other analysis environments within QRIScloud and UQ, via separate MeDiCI caches.
JCU has also invested in UQ’s HPC Wiener, a graphics processing unit (GPU) cluster for imaging, artificial intelligence and machine learning research. JCU’s research data is easily presented to Wiener via MeDiCI.
JCU’s MeDiCI cache went online in mid-2019, with a recent suspension while infrastructure was moved into a new data centre. It is now back online with the data migration effort from JCU’s end-of-life storage infrastructure into MeDiCI resuming.
The project is being driven by JCU’s Infrastructure Services department with Dr Wayne Mallet, Systems Manager of Research and Analytics, as project lead, with active participation from Infrastructure Analyst Wayne Spagnol and QRIScloud Systems Administrator Michael Mallon.
RCC developed MeDiCI and began operation of it at UQ in late 2016.
