News — CHICAGO, September 30, 2024 — Research organizations in the U.S. and around the world are modernizing their IT infrastructure to leverage the latest data management tools and techniques. AI/ML workloads require unique system architectures, and more compute power. Datasets in areas of cutting edge science such as genomics and bioinformatics and material science and molecular modeling have grown exponentially. As a result, more organizations are subscribing to Globus so they can take advantage of the platform’s wide range of research automation capabilities.
Globus, a non-profit service operated by the University of Chicago, provides secure and reliable mechanisms to manage data and advanced computation tasks. Whether organizations are deploying hybrid IT infrastructures, migrating to the cloud, or increasing the level of collaboration with other institutions, Globus enables them to maximize the return from their research IT investments.
Over the past year a number of research organizations, including the Salk Institute, UC Santa Cruz, the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (Barcelona, Spain), and Vlaams Institute for Biotechnology (Gent, Belgium), subscribed to Globus to streamline their data management and increase operational efficiency.
"Data is the lifeblood for scientific discovery and Globus is a critical enabling technology," says Jerry Sheehan, chief information officer at the Salk Institute. "From supporting resilience for big-data movement over diverse networks to helping assure the security of those transfers, it just works, allowing researchers to focus on innovation."
Over the past year Globus has added numerous new features to the service, including support for Dropbox, a JavaScript SDK, updates to its automation services, and multi-user support for Globus Compute.
Jeffrey Weekley, director of research IT at UC Santa Cruz relies on Globus to support a host of research and scientific applications, sharing more than 500TB with regional, national and international partners since the organization adopted Globus a year ago. “The ability to connect our researchers with partners virtually anywhere in the world, while sharing data seamlessly delivers great value to the university. It has allowed us to partner in new ways not possible before,” says Weekley. He cites UCSC’s world-renowned Genomics Institute as an example. The institute was asked to conduct DNA analysis of indigenous populations in Aotearoa (New Zealand), where sensitive data would have to be shared back to researchers across international undersea research networks. “Once we explained how Globus protected the data end-to-end during transmission and explained how Globus allowed us to transit non-commercial networks at very high speeds, both the researchers at the University of Auckland and UC Santa Cruz felt comfortable sharing the important and sensitive data between partners many thousands of miles apart. We could not have empowered our researchers to do this work so easily without Globus.”
At the Institute for Research Biomedicine (IRB) in Spain, research assistant Miguel Grau says “Globus is excellent for sharing data with collaborators from Europe and the US. It gives us an extra layer of security, for transfer of sensitive data, such as sequencing data for cancer studies in our case.”
“With Globus we managed to make the age-old problem of transferring large datasets between academic institutions, and different storage platforms like MinIO, easy for our users, and without intervention from our IT team,” says Tim Van de Woestyne, data center team lead, at VIB in Belgium.
Closer to home in Chicago, Patrick Davis, systems manager at the Field Museum of Natural History, says ”Managing natural history data relies on ever growing storage and network infrastructure to efficiently move large files around. In the past decade, the Field Museum's data storage and sharing needs have grown exponentially with the community's emphasis on collections digitization, hi-res imaging, and 3D scanning. That growth strained our ability to maintain efficient open access to data, and ultimately to align with CARE and FAIR principles. However with Globus, the Field Museum can now support efficient transfer and management of massive datasets, to keep publishing pipelines moving and data open to audiences.”
"We welcome our new subscribers and feel privileged to work with them on their most challenging research issues,” says Rachana Ananthakrishnan, Globus executive director. “Our vision is for researchers to be able to access any storage and computation resource they have access to, from anywhere, at any time—without the IT distracting them from their research. With Globus they can access all their storage and compute resources through a single, uniform interface, and even automate their entire research pipeline as their research scales.”
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