(This post has been updated; please scroll down for the latest.)
![Throughout the 2008 hurricane season, the Texas Advanced Computing Center was an active participant in a NOAA research effort to develop next-generation hurricane models. Teams of scientists relied on TACC's Ranger supercomputer to test high-resolution ensemble hurricane models, and to track evacuation routes from data streams on the ground and from space. Using up to 40,000 processing cores at once, researchers simulated both global and regional weather models and received on-demand access to some of the most powerful hardware in the world enabling real-time, high-resolution ensemble simulations of the storm. This visualization of Hurricane Ike shows the storm developing in the gulf and making landfall on the Texas coast [image courtesy Gregory P. Johnson, Romy Schneider, John Cazes, Karl Schulz, Bill Barth, The University of Texas at Austin; Frank Marks, NOAA; Fuqing Zheng, University of Pennsylvania; Yonghui Weng, Texas A&M; via NSF].](http://www.cccblog.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/big_data1_f-1.jpeg "Throughout the 2008 hurricane season, the Texas Advanced Computing Center was an active participant in a NOAA research effort to develop next-generation hurricane models. Teams of scientists relied on TACC's Ranger supercomputer to test high-resolution ensemble hurricane models, and to track evacuation routes from data streams on the ground and from space. Using up to 40,000 processing cores at once, researchers simulated both global and regional weather models and received on-demand access to some of the most powerful hardware in the world enabling real-time, high-resolution ensemble simulations of the storm. This visualization of Hurricane Ike shows the storm developing in the gulf and making landfall on the Texas coast [image courtesy Gregory P. Johnson, Romy Schneider, John Cazes, Karl Schulz, Bill Barth, The University of Texas at Austin; Frank Marks, NOAA; Fuqing Zheng, University of Pennsylvania; Yonghui Weng, Texas A&M; via NSF].")
The Obama Administration this morning unveiled details about its Big Data R&D Initiative, committing more than $200 million in new funding through six agencies and departments to improve “our ability to extract knowledge and insights from large and complex collections of digital data.” The effort, spearheaded by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and National Science Foundation (NSF), along with the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Department of Defense (DoD), Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Department of Energy (DoE) Office of Science, and U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), seeks to “advance state-of-the-art core technologies needed to collect, store, preserve, manage, analyze, and share huge quantities of data; harness these technologies to accelerate the pace of discovery in science and engineering, strengthen our national security, and transform teaching and learning; and expand the workforce needed to develop and use Big Data technologies.”
The first wave of commitments to support the Big Data Initiative features a new joint solicitation of up to $25 million supported by NSF and NIH – Core Techniques and Technologies for Advancing Big Data Science and Engineering (BIGDATA) – that will advance foundational research in Big Data. The solicitation aims to (after the jump):
» Read more: Obama Administration Unveils $200M Big Data R&D Initiative
![The Sloan Digital Sky Survey collects image data from an optical telescope in New Mexico [image courtesy Fermilab Visual Media Services via The New York Times].](http://www.cccblog.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/Data1-popup.jpeg "The Sloan Digital Sky Survey collects image data from an optical telescope in New Mexico [image courtesy Fermilab Visual Media Services via The New York Times].")
