CRII: CI: Exploring Advanced Cyber-Infrastructure Co-Design for Big Data Analytics

Rutgers University New Brunswick, New Brunswick NJ

Investigators

Abstract

The proliferation of digital data provides new opportunities in all areas of science, engineering and industry. However, the increasing data volumes and rates, and the associated costs in terms of latencies and energy, quickly dominate and limit data analytics applications' ability to leverage this data in an effective and timely manner. The co-design process enables scientists to reason about the rich design spaces available in software and hardware, and is expected to help in constructing a new class of cyber-infrastructure. Nevertheless, current solutions for big data analytics have important limitations that make these solutions infeasible for the next generation of cyber-infrastructure. As a result, exploring key co-design issues in the scope of big data analytics has become critical. The overarching goals of this research are to understand the performance and power behaviors and tradeoffs related to data placement, movement, and processing of big data analytics on systems with emerging architectures, and to develop models that can fundamentally enable big data analytics on ongoing cyber-infrastructure. In contrast to existing work, this research effort focuses on the co-design process that has been exploited in the context of large-scale scientific applications. Key research activities include building a framework to evaluate different classes of big data analytics, characterizing data analytics applications in terms of performance and power, and developing a methodology to construct models to understand and explore the design space. As data analytics applications become increasingly important in a wide range of domains, the ability to develop large-scale and sustainable platforms and software infrastructure to support these applications has significant potential to drive research and innovation in science and business domains. This project provides an understanding of hardware/software characteristics and requirements for big data analytics and future cyber-infrastructure design. These research activities are integrated with graduate and undergraduate student research, and leverage minority student outreach networks at Rutgers.