NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration

By: Jennifer Collings

Imagine the stress that would be put on your MP3 player if it had to manage 500 million songs.

Lead system software developer Jennifer Perez and lead system engineers for ANGe Caroline Rasmussen and Jim Davis ceremonially “push the button” to start the newest upgrade of the ANGe software.

Photo Credit: NASA

The Atmospheric Science Data Center (ASDC) of the Science Directorate at NASA’s Langley Research Center has approximately that same amount of data in its archive.

However, the more than 2 petabytes (2000 terabytes) of information in the ASDC isn’t music. It's crucial Earth science data. In order to keep that information safe, as well as make it easily accessible to scientists, there must be an advanced archiving system in place.

This week marks an important milestone in the launching of ANGe, or the Archive Next Generation software, the ASDC's newly tested advanced archiving system.

For the last decade, the data center has been using Langley’s TRMM Information System (LaTIS) to store data. This system was intended to be temporary, so over the years the ASDC has outgrown its technology.

Now that ANGe has passed its biggest test and has been launched to support most functions previously supported by LaTIS, the ASDC will be able to manage data much more efficiently. While data from Langley satellite instruments such as CERES and CALIPSO were on LaTIS, it operated at about 95 percent of ingest capacity. That same data takes up only 5 percent of capacity on ANGe.

In addition to ingesting, archiving and distributing CERES and CALIPSO data, ANGe is also able to create data products and give status reports, a feature that LaTIS did not have.

Atmospheric Science Data Center head John Kusterer and ANGe project managers Ronnie Gillian and Pam Rinsland cut the cake at the ANGe upgrade celebration hosted by SSAI.

Photo Credit: NASA

“ANGe is much more adaptable, modern and scalable. LaTIS’s processes require more manual intervention, while ANGe is more streamlined and automated,” explained John Kusterer, head of the ASDC.

After a detailed operational readiness review on August 27, in which the functional and production test results were analyzed, Kusterer and his colleagues determined that ANGe was ready to go live with its significantly increased functionality. Not only is ANGe helping to organize historical records, it is also paving the way for new data.

“We are positioning ourselves to be able handle the data coming from new instruments such as CLARREO and CERES FM 5," added Kusterer. "ANGe is extremely flexible, so we will able to fold those systems in much more easily than in the past.”


 
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