Visiting Scientist Facility at the IRIS DMC Enhanced

Many of the data sets that need processing and analysis today tax the capacity of the systems at many universities and research institutions. For this reason the IRIS Data Management System has developed a shared resource that is available to the seismological community. Anyone can request to use this facility by sending an email to the IRIS DMS Program Manager (). Approval is given with input from the DMS Standing Committee and availability of the resources needed. Over several years the IRIS DMS has allocated a small percentage of its funds to acquire hardware and software systems that can be used by scientists wishing to visit the IRIS DMC (located at the University of Washington) or for scientists that wish to use systems remotely over the Internet. Roughly 20 visiting scientists have made use of the Visiting Scientist facility since its inception. The majority of users to date have been PASSCAL investigators wishing to analyze their data sets or prepare them for distribution through the IRIS DMC.

Currently the Visiting Scientist facility consists of two reasonably powerful SUN servers that provide processing and storage capability that may not be available at other institutions. The first (original) machine is a Sparc 10 workstation (YODA) that is directly attached to a METRUM RSS-48 1 terabyte tape based mass storage system. In addition to the large mass storage system, YODA also has 44 gigabytes of RAID disk, Exabyte stackers and DAT stackers. The stackers are managed by a software system that allows control of the robotic tape handlers by scripts. DLT drives can also be made available. The second machine was added last year - a large SUN Enterprise Server 3000 (MEG). This system has 83 gigabytes of RAID disk; soon to be in a single partition. This system has a DLT drive as well as a single Exabyte drive.

Perhaps of more interest is the software presently loaded on MEG and/or YODA. This includes:

• OMEGA® - a 3 dimensional reflection seismic processing package
• MATLAB 5
• S.U. - a Seismic Processing package from the Colorado School of Mines
• Arc/Info
• GMT - a Mapping Utility
• PDB Tools - PASSCAL DBMS software
• Datascope Seismic Application Package (DSAP) - developed by the IRIS JSPC
• Postgress 95 Database Management System
• PDCC Toolkit - portable Data Collection Center software developed by the IRIS DMS for data quality assurance and conversion to SEED format
• SAC from LLNL

Those interested in using this facility can contact Tim Ahern for more information or to schedule use of the facility.