RCC has won a place in this year’s Huawei Research Innovation Program Open for a project aiming to significantly aid global data sharing and massive data analysis.
The Huawei HIRP Open 2017 received a large number of submissions and, according to Huawei’s website, only competitive ones were chosen to receive the research award.
RCC’s project, led by Jin Chao and David Abramson, aims to create a global hierarchical data storage system. The plan is to connect global data centres with a unified storage fabric to simplify data movement across multiple sites of both high performance computers and the cloud, and provide on-demand data access anytime and anywhere. This will involve devising a novel distributed file system and designing a top tier caching mechanism.
In its submission, RCC noted its team had successfully built MeDiCI (Metropolitan Data Caching Infrastructure), a data storage fabric for UQ. RCC’s proposal is to extend that experience on a global scale.
The HIRP Open is, according to Huawei’s website, “a one to two-year award to support contract-based innovation research of world-class full-time faculty members at top universities around the world.”
RCC plans to put the HIRP Open funding towards hiring a post-doc computer scientist to work on its project.
Huawei, a Chinese multinational information and communications technology (ICT) company, plans to finalise its contract with RCC by the end of this year.
