Welcome to Rick Benson's home page.
I am the Director of Operations for the IRIS Data Management
Center, located near the University of Washington in Seattle.
My mission is simple: provide rapid access to geophysical data.
As the most active archive of seismological data in the world,
we strive to archive, manage, and distribute these data with
minimal delay, and leverage extensive robotic technology to accomodate
this task.
The core of the Operations group consists
of 4 full time employees and myself. The process of ingesting nearly
17 terabytes of dual-sorted data and distributing over 2 terabytes
of customized request data annually is accomplished though robust
automation. This means that the 75,000+ requests that come
in annually leave the DMC within minutes to hours, depending upon
what the volume of data is. Because of the nature of dealing with
data, I call this group the "Engine Room". Because we
can distribute data electronically, we have eliminated the time-consuming
requirement of writing data to tape media. Here is a snapshot of
the core, robotic tape library, called the StorageTek Powderhorn.
This assembly holds 6,000 tapes, with a capacity of nearly one petabyte: |
Photo 1 on the left is
the outside perimeter of the Powderhorn, measuring 7.5' tall and
nearly 10' in diameter.
Photo 2 on the right is looking inside
of the unit, where you can see one end of the two-headed "arm",
which enables the robot to grab tapes from the tape slots that
are visible in the photo, and load them into one of 9 tape drives
stacked in a drive bay.
When I am not at the DMC, I am with my wife and daughter
in the mountains, swimming, or riding my bike.On the really good
days, it's all 3 at nearly the same time near Mt. Baker near the
Canadian border. |
