CSC News
NC State to Collaborate on National “Big Data” Initiative
Aiming to make the most of the fast-growing volume of digital data, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy recently announced a “Big Data Research and Development Initiative.” By improving our ability to extract knowledge and insights from large and complex collections of digital data, the initiative promises to help solve some of the Nation’s most pressing challenges.
To launch the initiative, six Federal departments and agencies are committing more than $200 million that will greatly improve the tools and techniques needed to access, organize and glean discoveries from huge volumes of digital data.
NC State University will collaborate with six research laboratories and six universities on a $25 million, five-year project, the Scalable Data Management, Analysis, and Visualization (SDAV) Institute. SDAV is funded through the U.S. Department of Energy’s Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing (SciDAC) program and will be led by Arie Shoshani of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
SDAV is a collaboration tapping the expertise of researchers at Argonne, Lawrence Berkeley, Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos, Oak Ridge and Sandia national laboratories, and in seven universities: Georgia Tech, NC State, Northwestern, Ohio State, Rutgers, the University of California at Davis and the University of Utah. The SDAV will help scientists develop new tools to help scientists manage and visualize data on the DOE’s supercomputers, which will further streamline the processes that lead to discoveries made by scientists using the DOE’s research facilities. The need for these new tools has grown as the simulations running on the DOE’s supercomputers have increased in size and complexity.
NC State’s portion of the award is $750,000. Dr. Nagiza Samatova, associate professor of computer science at NC State, is the co-PI on this project with Dr. Anatoli Melechko, associate professor in the Materials Science and Engineering Department.
For more information on the SDAV, click here.
~coates~
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