In the very near term Big Data Fast will be coming out of what has mainly been a stealth mode of operation for the past several years. In a collaboration with the University at Buffalo (UB), SUNY, we lead and developed the Data Intensive Discovery Initiative (Di2), an academic, government and industry consortium focused on data intensive science and engineering. The Di2 and coordinated initiatives at UB have received more than $15,000,000 from the National Science Foundation (NSF), National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the State of New York over the past few months to significantly increase the data and computationally intensive computing infrastructure housed at the Center for Computational Research (CCR) at the UB Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics and Life Sciences. A complete summary of the funding and systems is available at:
http://www.ccr.buffalo.edu/display/WEB/2010+Upgrades
Over the past two years we coupled massively parallel Field Programmable Gate Array Data Intensive Supercomputers (FPGA-DISCs) acquired through previous NFS awards and equipment loans by the DISC vendors, with traditional High Performance Computer (HPC) and Graphics Processor Unit (GPU) Cluster supercomputers. We identified many data intensive science and engineering applications that will benefit greatly through the use of DISC and HPC/GPU Clusters coupled tightly together as a single platform. These hybrid data intensive platforms provide total time to solution/discovery capabilities that is orders of magnitude faster than traditional general purpose commodity HPC clusters. In a number of cases we identified new methods to create and solve complex problems that could not be solved previously.
Over the coming weeks and months we will be providing more details of our work through press releases, joint announcements, presentations at conferences, published papers and updates to our web sites. Please visit often. We thank you for your interest in Big Data Fast and the Data Intensive Discovery Initiative at the University at Buffalo.
Sincerely,
Todd C. Scofield
Managing Director
Big Data Fast LLC
Founder and Co-Director
Data Intensive Discovery Initiative at the University at Buffalo, SUNY