Seminar: Overview of the NGAS archiving system and potential usage for ICRAR

Professor Andreas Wicenec 

ICRAR Fairway

ESO's Next Generation Archive System (NGAS) is being used at ESO, NRAO and ALMA to capture, store and distribute observational data. Currently it is managing all images and spectra produced by ESO's La Silla Paranal Observatories since about 1997. NRAO is using it to keep an maintain VLA, eVLA and VLBI data and ALMA deployed the system for the front-end data capturing and recently also for the main archive in Santiago.

NGAS as a system consists of a software and a hardware component and is fully scalable to at least a few PB of data. The software component, called NG/AMS, has been implemented in Python and provides a very flexible setup, which can be customized to a very high degree. One of the unique features of NGAS is the ability to keep and maintain a consistent archive across the globe. In its latest incarnation it can even keep mirror archives in sync and make optimal use of the available bandwidth between these archives.

On the user side it behaves like an object store, that means access to files are initiated solely by using so-called file-ids.

These are globally unique identifiers for every file stored in the system. The user does not have to know anything more than this ID in order to retrieve a file, even if it is actually located on the other side of the globe.

This talk will highlight some of the high level features of NGAS and discuss possible usage scenarios for ICRAR data.