Center for Data Intensive Science

Introduction to CDIS

We propose to create an NSF-supported Science and Technology Center for Data Intensive Science (CDIS) that will integrate the research, methodology, software, engineering and technology necessary to extract scientific knowledge from massive data collections and extend its findings to other communities and new generations of students. Driving the Center's research program are fundamental and applied disciplines which generate immense data volumes. Large collections today approach the Petabyte range (1,000 Terabytes) and are expected to expand by the early part of the next decade to the Exabyte scale, one thousand times larger!

We are thus said to be entering an era of data intensive science, in which new knowledge must be obtained by indexing, searching, filtering, and analyzing extremely large quantities of data. This era promises many new opportunities to automatically discern more subtle and rare patterns and signals than ever before possible, but it also presents enormous long-term Information Technology (IT) challenges. In particular, the need to process large quantities of data will force data-intensive applications to harness large numbers of distributed storage systems, networks, and computers. Moreover, as nationally and internationally distributed researchers increasingly work from their home institutions to make better use of their intellectual and institutional resources, they will require far better collaborative tools and other IT infrastructure to maximize the potential and rate of scientific discovery.

Data intensive sciences are associated with some of the most important and far-reaching research being carried out today on the fundamental forces of nature, biology and medicine, atmospheric and geophysical phenomena, and the composition and structure of the universe. These areas are well represented in our multi-disciplinary Center, which will conduct research in high energy and nuclear physics experiments, gravitational wave searches, digital sky surveys of various types, X-ray experiments at the Advanced Photon Source, climate modeling, geophysics, the Human Brain Project, and molecular genomics. Computer science and engineering research in diverse areas will also be supported, including grid computing, data mining, data warehousing, advanced scheduling and new network protocols for efficient movement of data.

The institutions composing CDIS are:

• University of Florida (lead institution)
• Florida State University
• University of Chicago
• University of Illinois at Chicago
• California Institute of Technology
• San Diego Supercomputing Center