NSF awards $7 Million to Texas Advanced Computing Center

Article: NSF Awards $7 Million To TACC for Remote Visualization and Data Analysis

I wasn’t sure what to blog about this week, so on a whim I went to Google news and searched for the words “science” and “cyberinfrastructure”; one of the articles I found was actually pretty exciting. The news broke today – according to the University of Texas public affairs news site, the National Science Foundation awarded the Texas Advanced Computing Center here at UT a 7 MILLION dollar grant to fund a three-year project that aims to "provide a new computing resource and the largest, most comprehensive suite of visualization and data analysis (VDA) services to the open science community."

According to the article, this new computing resource, unsurprisingly named "Longhorn", will help science communities both nationally and internationally. Longhorn will enable scientists to "interactively visualize and analyze datasets of near petabyte scale." I didn't know this before now, but a petabyte is apparently equal to one quadrillion bytes or 1,000 terabytes... which is quite a large number.

The article goes on to give many more technical system capabilities and components that Longhorn will have, which all sound really impressive, but I have no idea what any of it really means because I am not a deeply technical person. This project is being touted as “unprecedented” though, so the technology must be pretty spectacular. Check out the article for the specifics. To sum up the important part that I got out of this article: basically, this three-year project, which is slated to “enter full production” on January 4, 2010, will “provide the framework for leading researchers to collaborate and analyze their terascale datasets while still offering low barriers to entry and usability.” The 7 million dollar grant aims to "stimulate and support" new research in the area of visualization and data analysis. The grant will expire July 2012.

John Mullen, the vice president and general manager of Education, State and Local Government at Dell, praises this “long-term strategic investment” and says that Longhorn’s new advancements in technologies (particularly in CPU, GPU and networking technologies) will allow scientists to take on new, complex challenges. What TACC is developing could also have an impact on other fields. Kelly Gaither, who is the principal investigator and director of data and information analysis at TACC, says that Longhorn’s developments in interactive visualization and data analysis can help solve problems not only in science but also in engineering, medicine, and in the areas of national security and safety. The humanities aren't mentioned in this article, but I imagine it and other similar fields could probably benefit as well.

Basically the entire article mentions points we keep discussing in class: science and technology are both evolving rapidly; the internet and high performance computing are creating more and more data than people can handle at once; new technologies must be created to handle such large datasets and help link together those who are working on complex projects; and, finally, the fact that strategic investing is important in building parts of a cyberinfrastructure.

This seems like an exciting opportunity for the university, and I’m interested in finding out more about the project. As I mentioned, this was the first article that I found on the subject, and it came out only this morning. UT's much quoted motto is "what starts here changes the world"... we will have to see during the next three years if Longhorn will live up to this lofty goal.