Irene Barg has applied the SRB data grid technology for preservation of National Optical Astronomy Observatory images. The NOAO implementation federates six independent data grids, and pulls images from a data grid that manages images taken at the telescope in Cerro Tololo, to a data grid in La Serena, Chile, to a data grid in Tucson, Arizona, and then to an archive at NCSA.

The Global Grid Forum has initiated a Grid Interoperation Now working group to test the federation of independent data grids. The original federation effort for the 17th Global Grid Forum meeting demonstrated a federation of 14 SRB data grids, including the NOAO, DEISA, Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, SARA, Taiwan ASGC, Japan KEK and Teragrid data grids. In collaboration with the GGF Preservation Environments working group, a demonstration is planned for the 18th Global Grid Forum meeting in Washington DC on Sept 11-14, 2006 of the use of the federated data grids for preservation. Irene Barg is contributing a 1-Gigabyte image collection that will be replicated between multiple data grids within the federation. The goal is to demonstrate compliance with authenticity and integrity assertions.

The Large-scale Synoptic Survey Telescope project has also been exploring preservation requirements. They currently envision the preservation of more than 100 Petabytes of data, starting in 2013. A testbed similar to that used by NOAO is being implemented (R. Plante). Three SRB data grids are being federated to emulate the telescope at the top of the mountain, the base station at the bottom of the mountain, and the archive. The system will be used to evaluate the capability of current data grid technology to manage preservation of 5 Terabytes of data per day.