Sharing OOI’s Cyberinfrastructure with NSF COMPASS Fellows
On Thursday March 7, 2024, Senior Manager of Cyberinfrastructure and OOI Data Lead Jeffrey Glatstein introduced a group of 18 students and seven instructors in the National Science Foundation’s CI Compass Fellowship Program (CICF) for Undergraduates to the challenges of collecting, distributing, and keeping safe OOI’s vast amount of data. Students Fellows in CICF learn about real-world cyberinfrastructure challenges, and how to begin solving them for NSF Major Facilities
Glatstein first gave the group an overview of the type, amount, and diversity of data OOI collects from more than 900 instruments. The collected data consists of 135 billion rows of numerical data, 1.2 petabytes of raw data and nearly 10,000 hours of high-definition video, 327,000 hours of audio recordings, and 1.28 million digital still images.
He then shared OOI’s data delivery track record. Since 2016, OOI has responded to 987 million requests for calculated data, providing 333 terabytes of data.
Glatstein then went into detail about OOI’s extensive cybersecurity measures, which includes multiple storage sites with duplicate data to ensure that if the primary system went down, it could be quickly restored. This is particularly important for OOI because its stores data for posterity for future use in long-term time-series.
The students were amazed and engaged, as demonstrated by multiple questions after the presentation. Said Glatstein, “I enjoy sharing our work with students. It helps open their eyes to career opportunities in unexpected areas, like the ocean sciences, and their questions provides another way into looking at the work that we do.”
