ERA Research Laboratories
Images of the Three ERA Research Laboratories
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The ERA Lab at Archives I, Washington, DC |
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The ERA Lab at Archives II, College Park, MD |
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The ERA Lab at the Allegany Ballistics Laboratory, (ABL), Rocket Center, WV |
The ERA Research Laboratories provide an environment to test products and technologies that might inform the development of NARA’s ERA system. There are currently three ERA research facilities located at Archives I in Washington, DC, Archives II in College Park, MD, and at the Allegany Ballistics Laboratory (ABL) in Rocket Center, WV.
These research facilities enable ERA staff to work with research partners in a variety of ways. For example, our staff and partners test and apply new technologies on test collections of electronic records that present specific challenges that cannot be met with current technologies. These test collections include records such as digital photographs, digital video, geospatial data, virtual reality markup files, and web sites.
Using grid and metadata technologies, the ERA Transcontinental Persistent Archives Prototype (TPAP) was developed in partnership with the Data Intensive Cyber Environments (DICE) Group at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) and the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS) as a research test bed for the ERA Program. The TPAP is a distributed federation of different, and independently administered, computing platforms that interact as a single repository. The prototype is distributed between NARA, ABL, DICE, UMIACS, the Renaissance Computing Center (RENCI), and the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) utilizing an innovative Internet-2 data grid and is based on the SDSC Storage Resource Broker (SRB) technology.
Press Release, "NARA is Recipient of Internet2 IDEA Award" in the ERA MediaCenter
Page Last Updated: 06/09/08
