INDUSTRY

General Atomics (GA) has acquired an exclusive license from the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) to further develop the capabilities of the internationally recognized data management middleware, the Storage Resource Broker (SRB) for use in commercial applications. The SRB was originally developed through the cooperative efforts of GA and the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) beginning in 1995 with the support of the National Science Foundation (NSF). SDSC is an organized research unit of UCSD and is leading the way in developing a national Cyberinfrastructure that will provide the technological foundation for the next generation of science and engineering advances. Exact terms have not been disclosed. SRB enables users to create, manage, and preserve unified "virtual data collections" that are located on heterogeneous data resources distributed across a network. This announcement exemplifies the cooperative relationship between academia and industry in bringing advanced technology from federally funded research into pragmatic, cost-effective applications. SDSC will continue to develop SRB's capabilities to support research in science and engineering. GA plans to work closely with all hardware, database and application providers to ensure that their systems are "SRB-Enabled". In an "SRB-Enabled" mode, diverse data resources and software applications will be more easily accessed in a collaborative environment. Development of data management applications will be simplified. Additionally, SRB will apply the capabilities of accepted and developing standards for XML, web services and the grid, to web-based data access and communications. SRB is intentionally hardware and software agnostic; and GA will continue to work to ensure that SRB supports interoperability between both proprietary and open source storage systems. GA has an active and aggressive effort underway to identify and pursue complementary strategic alliance development to accelerate the deployment of SRB on a national and international level. "UCSD and SDSC continue to be an important technology resource for San Diego, the State of California, and the nation," said Neal Blue, Chairman and CEO of GA. "SDSC and GA have had an ongoing relationship now for almost two decades. GA's interest in the commercial development of SRB has largely been driven by SDSC's repeatedly successful efforts in evolving and deploying the technology over the past 8 years. The SDSC SRB team, led by Dr. Reagan Moore, has helped support successful implementation of SRB in over 55 nationally prominent collaborative research projects." According to Blue, "Dr. Moore, an originator and inventor of SRB, should be given great credit for recognizing over 10 years ago that a system such as SRB would be needed today and into the future to support the explosive growth of data and distributed high-performance computing. This capability is critical to our country's current economic, environmental, and defense needs. Over two years ago, we established the Nirvana Division of GA for the sole purpose of dedicating resources to SRB development, deployment, and commercialization. As evidenced by the execution of this license agreement, we look forward to building upon this obviously successful collaboration between UCSD, SDSC, and GA." "This licensing agreement is an important indicator of the maturity of the SRB data management middleware," said Reagan Moore, co-director of the Data and Knowledge Systems program at SDSC and adjunct professor of computer science in the Jacobs School of Engineering at UCSD. "The SRB team at SDSC is aggressively extending the SRB as the most advanced end-to-end system for data, information, and knowledge management in science and engineering research. The SRB technology is used to implement data grids for sharing data, digital libraries for publishing data, and persistent archives for preserving data." "Although originally developed to manage massive volumes of data used in very high-end applications for complex analyses, SRB also provides robust and proven capability for easily managing and accessing the exploding mass of information being generated within both the private and public sectors," said Constantin Scheder, Director of GA's Nirvana Division, and a strong advocate of SRB technology. "In essence, SRB transparently provides access to the right data, at the right time, to the right entity, resource, or person. SRB provides secure data access without having to know anything about the underlying infrastructure. Additionally, the ability to remotely administer SRB allows a small staff to administer data resources across an entire enterprise or global community of data users and providers. Ultimately, we save you time in organizing, finding, reaching, accessing, and integrating your data resources, saving you money." Bill Decker, Assistant Director for physical science licensing with UCSD's office of Technology Transfer and Intellectual Property Services (TechTIPS), stated. "We're pleased that our office could assist in working with GA to bring this SDSC developed technology to the public at-large."