Encouraging Cyberinfrastructure Collaboration for Digital Preservation: Paper - iPRES 2008 - London

Over the last several decades, U.S. supercomputing centers such as the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), the National Center for Supercomputer Applications (NCSA), and the Texas Advanced Computer Center (TACC), along with national partnerships such as the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI) and TeraGrid have developed a rich tradition of support for advanced computing applications and infrastructure. In addition, these centers have developed some of the worlds longest continually operating archives of digital information. These characteristics enable such nationally-funded centers to become natural partners for the library and archive communities as they develop digital preservation infrastructure. Concepts which will be critically important to the development of long-term preservation networks, including cyberinfrastructure and data grids, have grown out of the National Science Foundation and its programs for supercomputer centers. The centers have also served as hosts for long-running development and testing of software tools for data management in distributed environments, including the SRB and iRODS data grid software. These centers are also natural sites for the deployment of necessary physical and virtualized cyberinfrastructure for digital preservation. Several important current and past initiatives, from InterPARES (Duranti) to Chronopolis have involved staff and resources at supercomputing centers working directly with archives and libraries. Along with these opportunities, there are significant challenges to the integration of the current infrastructure involved in the support of advanced computational science, on the one hand, and services that support the community needs for digital preservation on the other. This paper provides an overview of software development and deployments in the context of supercomputing centers and national partnerships, describing foundational cyberinfrastructure efforts, which provide physical and logical support for more advanced digital collection and preservation projects in both the sciences and the humanities. The paper then surveys some important recent work at sites in the NSF’s national cyberinfrastructure project, the TeraGrid, related to the digital preservation arena. It also examines two projects that the Library of Congress' National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program Program (NDIIPP) has funded at SDSC to study large-scale, long-term digital archives. These projects provide valuable examples of collaborative digital preservation practice within the context of a shared U.S. cyberinfrastructure. Finally, we consider the possibilities for further development of digital preservation infrastructure and partnerships within the Teragrid and across international boundaries. The character of digital preservation development outside of the United States is briefly considered and compared, and future directions for international efforts are evaluated.