A Campus Petabyte: Building CephRDS for Researchers and the NRP

CephRDS is the research object store UC Riverside (UCR) built with National Science Foundation (NSF) Campus Cyberinfrastructure award OAC-2346636. The award PI (principal investigator) is Michael Kennedy; I am a co-PI, and the build was team work. Its 3.2 PB of raw disk yields 2090.88 TB usable under 6+3 erasure coding. It is split two ways: 422.40 TB pledged to the National Research Platform (NRP), a national research computing federation, and 1668.48 TB kept as a UCR pool. Researchers reach it over the Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) protocol from the campus network or the campus virtual private network (VPN). Pilot labs hold about 560 TB of allocations. The hardware was delivered as planned; the operational questions took longer: who manages which part of the capacity, how researchers get in, and how the campus pays for it after the grant. The team dropped a proposed self-service portal for split management with a fixed boundary around the NRP pledge. The recharge rates are still being finalized, and I have no on-campus performance baseline yet. Field Notes technical report. Web edition: https://charles-forsyth.github.io/papers/2026-10-29-a-campus-petabyte.html. This record holds the PDF (ACM sigconf, PDF/A-2b) and the LaTeX source.