Long a leader in data technologies, SDSC released version 0.5 of iRODS, the open-source Integrated Rule-Oriented Data System, which represented a new approach to distributed data management.

Immense collections of digital data began ushering in a new era in science and engineering, with dramatic results. Many digital data collections exceeded 100 terabytes in size (one terabyte is 1,000 gigabytes), many times larger than the digital text size of all the books in the Library of Congress. But managing and using this explosion of data is easier said than done. With iRODS, researchers were able to ingest digital data from real-time sensor networks like those used in oceanography, or capture massive data output from large-scale simulations of turbulence. They could extract descriptive metadata, manage their data, move it efficiently, share it securely with collaborators, publish it in digital libraries and, finally, archive it for long-term preservation.