CLEMSON, S.C., March 30, 2017 — Clemson University scientists Alex Feltus and Melissa Smith have received a $2.95 million collaborative award from the National Science Foundation to develop cyberinfrastructure aimed at providing researchers around the nation and world with a more fluid and flexible system of analyzing large-scale data.
- Biologists, hydrologists, computer engineers and computer scientists will join forces with Feltus and Smith to design a system called Scientific Data Analysis at Scale (SciDAS).
- The goal is to help current researchers and future innovators discover data, move it smoothly across advanced networks, and improve flexibility and accessibility to national and global resources.
- Co-principal investigators include Claris Castillo and Ray Idaszak of Renaissance Computing Institute at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; and Stephen Ficklin of Washington State University in Pullman.
- Video: watch Feltus and Smith explain what this award means for scientists working with large-scale data, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fyzuufFWuxk
“A key aspect of the SciDAS team is that we’ll be processing scientific data at the same time that we’re gluing together all the parts needed for a national cyberinfrastructure ecosystem,” said Feltus, associate professor of genetics and biochemistry in Clemson University’s College of Science. “We’re trying to avoid the problem of ‘if you build it they will come’ and instead enlist the input of a variety of scientists to join us on the ground floor and help us build it. Thus, our software will be refined by using real data by real users with real habits.”
Scientific discovery has become increasingly dependent on terascale and even petascale data processing that only the world’s fastest supercomputers can process. Fortunately, years of significant and strategic support from public and private sectors have created a distributed computational ecosystem to help meet these extraordinary demands. Available resources include high-speed networks like Internet2, open source scientific software packages, supercomputers in national labs, campus supercomputers, commercial cloud providers and deep data repositories like the National Center for Biotechnology Information. In addition, Internet2’s cyberteam will be assisting the research team in optimizing end to end data transfer rates.
Read the full press release here.
About Internet2
Internet2 is a non-profit, member-driven advanced technology community founded by the nation’s leading higher education institutions in 1996. Internet2 serves more than 94,000 community anchor institutions, 317 U.S. universities, 70 government agencies, 43 regional and state education networks, over 900 InCommon participants, 78 leading corporations working with our community, and more than 60 national research and education network partners representing more than 100 countries.
Internet2 delivers a diverse portfolio of technology solutions that leverages, integrates, and amplifies the strengths of its members and helps support their educational, research and community service missions. Internet2’s core infrastructure components include the nation’s largest and fastest research and education network that was built to deliver advances, customized services that are accessed and secured by the community-developed trust and identity framework.
Source: Internet2