ACM TechNews

Computation Institute to Bulk Up Data Analysis Capability With $1.5 Million Grant

University of Chicago (08/05/08)

The Computation Institute, a joint effort by the University of Chicago and the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory, has received a $1.5 million National Science Foundation grant for a computer system that will allow researchers to store, access, and analyze large sets of data. The new system is called the Petascale Active Data Store (PADS) and has been optimized for quick data transactions, both on campus and worldwide. The PADS design is the result of a study on the storage and analysis requirements of groups in astronomy and astrophysics, computer science, economics, evolutionary and organismal biology, geosciences, high-energy physics, linguistics, materials science, neuroscience, psychology, and sociology. The PADS teams say the new system will give these groups the opportunity to look at their data in new ways, resulting in innovative scientific insights and collaborations across disciplines. PADS will also help computer science researchers examine active data storage systems and provide rich data to investigate new techniques. PADS will contain several nVidia Tesla graphics processing units (GPUs) that will be integrated with traditional CPUs. The GPUs are capable of computing certain operations many times faster than general-purpose hardware. PADS will be a hybrid system with multiple layers that range from a large, tape-based system at Argonne to individual computers on campus and in other locations.

http://news.uchicago.edu/news.php?asset_id=1419

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