January 2013 User of the Month: Ann Syrowski

January 23, 2013

I am happy to announce that the user of the month for January 2013 is Ann Syrowski from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Ann is a Research Professional in the Atmospheric Science department’s Convective Modeling Group. She develops numerical simulations of severe storms using the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model and several HPCs throughout the country. Ann has moved more than 100 TB of data using Globus Online—50 TB in the past month alone—among a variety of HPC resources including XSEDE resources, NCSA’s mass storage system, and PSC’s data archiver.

 Some of her multi-terabyte transfers from the mass storage system took several days to complete, as it involves staging the data from tape to disk before the data can be moved. Thankfully, she didn't have to babysit those transfers. Without Globus Online, the transfers would have been quite painful and would have taken much longer. Globus Online's enhanced interaction with mass storage systems speeds up transfers and offers automatic recovery from transient failures. "Globus Online has made my life much easier," says Ann. "I've had to generate, plot, and analyze over 100 TB of model data. Moving such large amounts of data from one HPC to another is time-consuming, prone to glitches, and often impossible with other file transfer methods. Globus Online is incredibly easy to use and cuts way down on the amount of time I spend setting up file transfers. It's become absolutely necessary in the work that I do." Congratulations, Ann, and thanks for your use of Globus Online!