OSiRIS

HORUS builds on similar work done through the previous OSiRIS project, also funded by the National Science Foundation. (In Egyptian mythology, Horus was the son of Osiris.)

OSiRIS (Open Storage Research Infrastructure) was a five-year project to create a high performance, software-defined storage infrastructure to meet the burgeoning needs of a wide variety of science domains in the Midwest. Many users requested access to associated computational resources able to transform, filter, and analyze their stored data. While that was out of scope for OSiRIS, HORUS provides an opportunity to meet the computational needs of under-resourced researchers in the region.

OSiRIS formally ended in August 2021, but our hosting institutions continue to support best-effort operations and maintenance. This is because we were able to show significant benefit for our institutional researchers through OSiRIS.

HORUS will use the existing OSiRIS deployment to provide space, networking, and use of existing monitoring and accounting created by OSiRIS. Our intent for the longer term sustainability of HORUS is similar to what we have done for OSiRIS: showing benefit to our institutions’ researchers as well as researchers across the region. Our institutions then can support continued operations and maintenance beyond the funded lifetime of the project. Our expectation is that we will also be successful in acquiring additional resources, internally and externally, to build upon a successful HORUS implementation.