Data Services Newsletter

Volume 5 : No 1 : January 2003

The DMC Engine Room

The IRIS DMC Operations Group consists of 4 full time employees. As a collective group, we are charged with archiving, managing, and distributing data from the 30 TB data archive, which is expanding at a dull-sorted rate of approximately 8 TB per year.

The core duties assigned to this group are modular in nature, but interleaved duties and utilization of robotic mass storage technology keep the Operations processes running in continuous mode, 24×7.

Rick Benson – Director of Operations at the DMC

Photo of Rick Benson

This position requires cheerleading. (More cheering, less of the leading.) Responsibilities include acquiring necessary resources, being attentive to data problems, and most importantly, deflecting data problems. New data sources work with Rick to get their data archived at the DMC. There is alot of outside interaction with a cross section of the seismology community, helping with identifying problem areas in any core tasks assigned to Operations.

Mary Edmunds

Photo of Mary Edmunds

Mary is a Data Control Technician, responsible for overseeing all of the customized data request processing, and managing the “nearline” archive of non-SEED formatted data (referred to as “assembled data”). Mary has the most communication with end users of data, and is nimble with identifying and fixing a wide variety of problems. She has become the resident expert on tape drive operation, and probably can’t wait until she never has to write another tape.

Anh Ngo

Photo of Anh Ngo

Anh is the Operations Programmer and is responsible for all software coding for routine request processing. Anh is always taking on the increasingly expanding role of coordinating processing such as data synchronization, database interfacing, and various data problem resolutions. Her depth of knowledge on all matters related to operations efficiency is invaluable, and her intolerance for incompleteness is a gift.

Stacy Fournier

Photo of Stacy Fournier

Stacy is the Data Control Technician responsible for overseeing all data archiving. This has increased in scale to include all the automated and real-time data archiving. She oversees the ingestion of approximately 47 different network pools of data. Determining the most efficient manner for archiving is her primary focus, as the manner which data arrives is varied by source, and relies on a vast array of computer hardware and RAID filesystems. By keeping current on all matters related to archiving, she has enabled the DMC to ingest exponentially more data than was ever imagined.

Mission Statement

The mission statement of the Operations group (a.k.a Engine Room) is: Enable Access to Data.

We would like to hear from anyone with comments or suggestions related to their interaction with the DMC through the data requesting mechanisms. Please contact us.

by Rick Benson (IRIS Data Management Center)

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