Computation Institute to bulk up data analysis capability with $1.5 million
grant
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ARGONNE, Ill. (Aug. 5, 2008) — The Computation
Institute, a joint effort of
the University of Chicago and the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National
Laboratory, has received a grant for a computer system that will enable researchers
to store, access and analyze massive datasets.
The system is made possible by a $1.5 million grant from the National
Science Foundation, which includes cost-sharing support from the University of Chicago. The new system is called the Petascale Active Data Store (PADS), which has
been optimized for rapid data transactions, both on campus and around the globe.
Petascale computing involves the manipulation of petabytes of data. A petabyte
is the equivalent of data contained on 1.5 million CD-ROMs.
The PADS design results from a study of 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.
For these groups, according to the PADS team, PADS represents a significant
opportunity to look at their data in new ways, enabling new scientific insights
and new collaborations across disciplines. PADS will also serve as a vehicle
for computer science research into active data storage systems and will provide
rich data with which to investigate new techniques.
Results will be made available as open source software, which can be freely
downloaded and adapted for other purposes by interested users.
“PADS will bring a significant analysis resource to the University of Chicago
campus and provide a testbed for research on high-performance analysis, a likely
bottleneck in the scientific pipeline of the future,” said Michael Papka, Deputy
Associate Laboratory Director for Computing,
Environment, and Life Sciences at Argonne. Papka lead the interdisciplinary team of University of Chicago
researchers who developed the PADS proposal.
Several nVidia Tesla graphics processing units (GPUs) will be integrated with
traditional CPUs in the PADS system. These GPUs are capable of computing certain
operations many times faster than general-purpose personal computers.
“The Tesla nodes will allow us to experiment with algorithms that combine
traditional CPUs and special-purpose GPUs to extract results from data faster
than in the past,” said Ian Foster, Director of the Computation Institute and
the Arthur Holly Compton Distinguished Service Professor in Computer Science
at the University of Chicago. “For example, in neuroscience, we will be using
the system to accelerate Magnetic Resonance Imaging algorithms to diagnose
traumatic brain injury.”
PADS will be a hybrid system with many layers of storage. These layers range
from a large, tape-based system at Argonne to individual computers on campus
and elsewhere. The intermediate layer is a rack of computer disks at Argonne
containing duplicate data sets as insurance against hard-drive failure.
To University of Chicago scientists, PADS represents a dramatic improvement
over current practice, which requires them to quickly analyze data and then
remove it from the system to make room for new datasets. With the storage that
PADS provides, groups will be able to keep data active for longer periods of
analysis.
“PADS will allow us to share unique datasets with a larger community of researchers,
enabling analysis of the data in different ways without the necessity to quickly
remove the data because we need the space,” said Don Lamb, Director of the
Center for
Astrophysical Thermonuclear Flashes and the Louis Block Professor
in Astronomy & Astrophysics at the University of Chicago.
The Computation Institute was founded in 2000 as a joint effort between Argonne
and the university. Its mission is to address the most challenging problems
arising in the use of strategic computation and communications.
About Argonne
Argonne National Laboratory seeks solutions to pressing national problems in science and technology.
The nation's first national laboratory, Argonne conducts leading-edge basic
and applied scientific research in virtually every scientific discipline. Argonne
researchers work closely with researchers from hundreds of companies, universities,
and federal, state and municipal agencies to help them solve their specific
problems, advance America 's scientific leadership and prepare the nation for
a better future. With employees from more than 60 nations, Argonne is managed
by UChicago
Argonne, LLC for
the U.S.
Department of Energy's Office
of Science.
About the University of Chicago
Founded by oil magnate John D. Rockefeller, the University of Chicago is a
private, nondenominational, coeducational institution for higher learning.
Scientists at the university are working at the cutting edge of virtually every
field of science from cosmological astrophysics to molecular genetics and from
high-energy particles physics to psychoneuroimmunology. Eighty-one recipients
of the Nobel Prize have been researchers, students or faculty member at the
university at some point in their careers.
More information
For more technical specification and other information on PADS, see www.ci.uchicago.edu/pads.
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