UCHRI launches HASS Grid

The University of California Research Institute (UCHRI) announced the launch of the HASS Grid, a major cyberinfrastructure initiative to strengthen research support for the humanities, arts and social sciences.

The HASS Grid will provide a home for digitized artifacts including 3-D, audio, video and text collections crucial to research in the HASS communities. David Theo Goldberg, director of UCHRI, explained: "The HASS Grid provides a base platform for integrating the full range of multimedia cyber-tools in support of accessing and analyzing large databases across the humanities, arts and social sciences. It will prove crucial for future work in cultural representation, the understanding of material culture, their historical conditions and social implications. But it will also offer opportunities to a broader range of intellectual communities to revisit older interests such as the analysis of medieval manuscripts."

In July, UCHRI began the construction and deployment of cyberbricks. These bricks, or storage computers, enable access to aggregated, integrated, data-storage systems. Through this system, UCHRI will provide a low-cost, scalable, long-term archive for HASS data collections. UCHRI intends to bring 25TB of storage space online by January.

Initially, the HASS Grid will be a test-bed for HASS researchers throughout the University of California. Starting in spring, the system will be released to a wider audience.

UCHRI is working with the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS) at UC-Berkeley and the San Diego Supercomputer Center to create the systems for storing, accessing, analyzing and manipulating the data collections crucial to HASS research. Together, UCHRI, CITRIS and SDSC are building an interface between the CITRIS Digital Gallery Builder -- a 3-D virtual world space for presenting and collaborating on digital collections -- and SDSC's Storage Resource Broker -- a client-server middleware designed to manage file collections in heterogeneous, distributed environments.

The term "cyberinfrastructure," coined by a National Science Foundation blue-ribbon committee, describes new research environments in which advanced computational, collaborative, data acquisition and management services are available to researchers through high-performance networks. To date, the great majority of these new integrated computing environments have been targeted at the sciences.

Offical Press Release