DICE Center

The DICE Center is a new campus-wide UNC Center, created in April 2009, which builds on a 13-year research and development effort out of the DICE Group.  The DICE Center is a community of scholars and science and technology experts at UNC coming together to:

• develop an interdisciplinary model for campus data management cyberinfrastructure,
• collaborate with groups across the UNC system on issues of distributed data management,  digital preservation,  data intensive computing,  digital library systems, and data curation,
• sustain national and international leadership in the creation of new approaches for the integration and federation of data.

The DICE Center provides expertise and software technologies in the areas of large-scale data management for collaborative research, digital archiving, and long-term data preservation.  The Integrated Rule-Oriented Data System (iRODS) is open source software developed by the DICE team for managing data grids, and it features an adaptive rule engine  for automating institutional data policies in distributed environments.  iRODS provides scientists with a secure, scalable system that can support many aspects of research data management.  DICE brings experience in data grids and preservation environments  in a wide range of fields such as health care, disaster  research, and humanities.

The DICE Group was founded in 1996 under funding from DARPA to conduct research on Massive Data Analysis Systems.  The original members of the group included Arcot Rajasekar, who led the data grid technology development, Mike Wan, the chief architect, and Wayne Schroeder, who developed the authentication system.

In subsequent projects, the DICE group developed a patent digital library for the USPTO, built a Transcontinental Persistent Archive Prototype for NARA, implemented an archive for the National Science Digital Library, and supported implementation of data grids for DoE, IMLS, NASA, NSF, and NHPRC.

Two generations of data grid technology have been developed by the DICE Group.  The Storage Resource Broker data grid is in production use in support of international communities. More than 4 Petabytes of data have been organized into shared data collections.  The integrated Rule Oriented Data System (iRODS) is the second generation of data grid technology. The iRODS data grid automates the application of management policies and validation of assessment criteria.  Additional information on data grid technology can be found at http://diceresearch.org

• Reagan Moore: Director
• Richard Marciano: Executive Director
• Arcot Rajasekar: Director of Research and Technology

• Mike Wan: Chief Architect
• Wayne Schroeder:  Product Manager / Core Developer
• Sheau-yen Chen: Data Grid System Administrator
• Lucas Gilbert: Consultant, Java Developer
• Chien-yi Hou: Digital Preservation Specialist
• Paul Tooby: Community Development Coordinator
• Antoine de Torcy: Data Grid Developer
• Bing Zhu: Computational Scientist

• Sustainable Archives & Library Technologies (SALT): Richard Marciano, Professor at SILS
• Data Grid and Policy: Arcot Rajasekar, Professor at SILS
• Digital Curation @ Carolina: Helen Tibbo, Professor at SILS

• José-Marie Griffiths: SILS Professor & Deputy Director (Biomedical Informatics) of the North Carolina Translational and Clinical Sciences (TraCS) Institute
• Javed Mostafa: Frances Carroll McColl Term Associate Professor at SILS and the Biomedical Research Imaging Center (BRIC)
• Jan Prins: Professor of Computer Science and Department Chair

• NSF
  • OCI-0848296: “NARA Transcontinental Persistent Archives Prototype”
  • SDCI 0721400: “Data Grids for Community Driven Applications”
  • TDLC: Temporal Dynamics of Learning Center
• NIH: CTSA TraCS Institute / LAIR Laboratory
• NHPRC
  • DCAPE: Distributed Custodial Archive Preservation Environments
  • e-Legacy: Preservation of California’s Geospatial Records
• IMLS: T-RACES: Testbed for the Redlining Archives of California’s Exclusionary Spaces
• RENCI: Renaissance Computing Institute
• SILS:  School of Information and Library Science