II-NEW: Shared High Performance Data Center

Texas State University - San Marcos, San Marcos TX

Investigators

Abstract

The high performance data center planning project provides computational and storage resources to generate meaningful data sets and disseminate them to the public. This project utilizes computing infrastructure with large numbers of processing cores to provide a parallel computing environment required for data processing using algorithms developed for this project. The planning phase of this project is limited in scale and provides a roadmap to building large scale infrastructure to support data management and dissemination for a range of applications. The infrastructure acquired under this project is used to (i) generate spatiotemporal data sets describing the extent and motion of hurricanes, storm systems, and other natural phenomena; (ii) create visual words, visual phrases, and visual blocks based on image contents to improve image search; (iii) manage information on search preferences and search characteristics of users for improved web search; and (iv) provide utilities to enable access to deep web data sources for scientific domains. Data sets and utilities created through this project will be made publicly available. This project serves as a catalyst for research in many fields through the production of high quality data sets, and the production of methods and utilities required collect, manipulate, and use the data. Furthermore, this work and the hardware supporting it is being directly integrated into computer science classes to expose students to high performance computing and the value of high quality data sets for research.