Sustainable Geographic Archiving of Historical Documents

The San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of California San Diego has started an ambitious project of bringing Redlining grid data to UC campuses. Redlining is the practice of discriminating in housing or insurance. Of great historical significance, valuable documents on redlining of neighborhoods in the 1930s and 1940s in eight California cities will now be available online in the new project.Social Science Data Grid and CAStor

Implementation started with a CAStor clustered storage pool initially tasked with archiving The Redlining Archives of California's Exclusionary Spaces (T-RACES). The T-RACES project will be one of the first to utilize the new Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (HASS) Grid, a cyber-infrastructure initiative organized by the UC Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI). It will eventually provide researchers across all UC campuses with shared access to rare historical documents and other information dating back more than 70 years. The HASS Grid along with CAStor and other key software tools brings new analytical capabilities for researchers to collaborate with colleagues, produce more accurate conclusions and publish their findings into a digital library.

Customer Benefits

  • Eliminates performance and scalability limitations of conventional clustered storage systems by virtualizing storage across internal disks on every node and providing a vast 128-bit flat address space
  • Easily scale from Terabytes to Petabytes using commodity server hardware
  • Automated replication and archiving features minimize administrative effort
  • Ease of local replication, storage-policy based retention, and wide area replication through sets of rules provide needed flexibility
  • Interoperability between storage infrastructures allowed for cross-registration of the red-lining content and CAStor

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