Weekly readings - 10 November 2006

Petascale storage may trickle down to you. Gary Anthes. Computerworld. November 06, 2006.

Questions about computer speed and storage will become the focus of the Petascale Data Storage Institute. “The overall goal is to make storage more efficient, reliable, secure and easier to manage in systems with tens or hundreds of petabytes of data spread across tens of thousands of disk drives, possibly used by tens of thousands of clients.” This may not be the system that you are using, but the research will benefit other users. High performance computing is more about quality than cost reduction. Problems they are trying to resolve include:

· Slow disk access times as disk size increases

· Reducing the failure rate of disks

· Better fault tolerant systems

· More efficient file systems

Scirus Partners with Indian Institute of Science. Press Release. November 1, 2006.

Elsevier has announced that it will partner with the Indian Institute of Science to index their two institutional repositories. The first is a research repository that uses GNU EPrints software to archive their preprints, post-prints and other scholarly publications. The second is their digital repository of Theses and Dissertations which has been developed to capture, disseminate and preserve their research theses. The repository uses DSpace and allows them to self archive their theses and dissertations.

IBM fattens tape capacity to 700GB. Robert Mullins. Computerworld. November 01, 2006.

IBM has introduced a tape cartridge that holds 700G bytes of data with the same size as lower-capacity tapes. The 700GB cartridges are available for both permanent read-only archiving and re-writable. The tapes are best suited for long-term data storage.

Content as a Digital Asset. Puneet Vohra. Hindustan Times. November 8, 2006.

Content on a website is an asset. Presently it may not be considered valuable, but the value may increase in the future. “Maintaining archives is equivalent to preserving your heritage.” It is important to preserve your digital heritage, and websites are part of that heritage. “An archive needs to recreate the look and feel of the original record.”