The Next Generation Archive System (NGAS) is a very feature rich, archive handling and management system. In its core it is a HTTP based object storage system. It can be deployed on single small servers, or in globally distributed clusters.
NGAS is written in Python, and thus highly portable. As of version 11 it supports both Python 2.7 and 3.5+ (support for 2.7 will be removed though). The implementation is pure Python, but there are a few dependencies on C libraries as well and that may restrict the ability to install it on some of the more exotic platforms. It is possible to run more than one server on a single host and it is possible to run many servers across hundreds of nodes as well as across various sites. The more advanced features allow mirroring of sites running independent NGAS clusters, but it is also possible to run multiple clusters against a central database.
Please refer to the Installation section of our documentation for instructions on how to compile and install NGAS either manually or automatically.
Our documentation is online.
The system has been originally developed and used extensively at the European Southern Observatory to archive the data at the observatories in Chile and mirror the data to the headquarters in Germany. It has also been deployed at the NRAO in Socorro and Charlottesville and the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array (ALMA) is using the system to collect the data directly at the control site in the Chilean Andes and then distribute the data to Santiago and further on to the ALMA regional centers in the US, Japan and Germany. NGAS is controlling millions of files all around the world and it is scaling very well. The version of NGAS delivered in this distribution is a branch of the original ALMA version. It had been further developed and adopted to deal with the much higher data rate of the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) and quite some work went into the installation and automatic test features.
Please see the COPYRIGHT file for information on copyright, and the AUTHORS and ACKNOWLEDGMENTS files for information about authors and the story of NGAS.
