Letter in Support of High Speed Data Transfer Tools for NIH Repositories

[Karl Kornel]

Hello!

This email is for folks who (either directly or by supporting users) deal with data transfer from NIH data repositories, and who have not gotten this message through CaRCC or CASC.  (BTW, “NIH data repositories” includes Controlled-Access Data Repositories like dbGaP.)

For some time, folks have been wanting NIH to provide access to their repositories via Globus.  This has been brought up in the Globus Customer Forum before, with the response from the Globus folks (if I remember correctly) being “We’ve approached the NIH before, but they want to hear from the folks doing the downloads, not from us.”

After a fair amount of legwork, and conversations with the Globus folks, Bill Barnett of UMass Chan Medical School has put together a “Letter in Support of High Speed Data Transfer Tools for NIH Repositories”.  Addressed to the managers of dbGaP, GEO, and other NIH repositories, the letter asks them to “[implement] data transport tools and workflows such as Globus…”.

Here is Bill’s message and the link to the letter (in Google Doc form).  If your institution uses data from NIH repositories, and has not yet signed, I encourage you to do so!

I am helping an effort to express the needs of the research and research computing community for higher speed data transfer tools to and from NIH repositories.  With the rapidly increasing size of data moving to and from these repositories, the current toolset does not have sufficient capacity to keep up with the data transfer needs.  I do not believe NIH has really heard from the community that this is a pressing need. NIH does use high speed tools such as Globus for internal data transfers, but not for transfers between our institutions and NIH repositories.  Some of you (Thanks very much!) have already signed the below letter advocating that we work with NIH to address this situation, and CASC has graciously agreed to send a supporting letter. I wanted to give this community the opportunity to include their voice.  Please review and I hope, if you have not already signed, you will be willing to do so.  Also happy to have any recommendations you have for how to work with NIH on this as next steps.  Thanks! 

https://docs.google.com/document/d/12T5z4Mv2t2af27bFxKR5ez43CgtyPNsr3KOAQ1OPIFw/edit?tab=t.0

 

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A. Karl Kornel | Info. Sys. Specialist

UIT Research Computing | Stanford University

+1 (650) 736-9327