MRI: Enabling Research on Terabyte-Scale Datasets

Northeastern University, Boston MA

Investigators

Abstract

This project, acquiring a cluster to perform research on terabyte-scale problems in the areas of information retrieval, network traffic analysis, intrusion detection, and image processing for biomedicine, enables long term studies by providing access to users with terabytes of storage for extended periods of time. In this shared facility, investigators will cooperatively exploit a cluster containing 20 terabytes of disk storage. Additionally, a high performance terabyte disk subsystem, connected by fibre channel will serve as a higher speed cache for the large disk storage. To complete the memory storage, data migration will leverage using existing tertiary storage backup systems. In order to attain both the highest efficiency and the highest flexibility in processing such large datasets, the cluster employs quad-processor nodes and 8 GB of RAM per node. Testing on full size data eliminates errors caused by sampling smaller datasets in many areas. Enabling new research, the projects range from analysis of distributed denial of service, through learning for biomedical images, to parallel tomosynthesis. Software tools to be refined on this facility include methodologies for Information Retrieval, Support Vector Machines (SVM), Clustering, Network Simulation, Out-of-Core Search, 3-D Image Reconstruction, and Spatial and Temporal Databases. It is anticipated that the increase in data manipulation capabilities will provide much quicker turn-around and make possible results that are inaccessible with the currently installed technology.