Featured Project

Petashare

The unbounded increase in the size of data generated by scientific applications necessitates collaboration and sharing among the nation's education and research institutions. Simply purchasing high-capacity, high-performance storage systems and adding them to the existing infrastructure of the collaborating institutions does not solve the underlying and highly challenging data handling problem. Scientists must spend a great deal of time and energy on issues such as the physical location of data, how to access it, and/or how to move it to visualization and/or compute resources for further analysis. LSUÕs Petashare project aims to solve these issues.

What are the goals of this project?

LSU assistant professor Tevfik Kosar and his team aim to develop an innovative distributed data archival, analysis and visualization cyberinfrastructure for data intensive collaborative research. PetaShare will enable transparent handling of underlying data sharing, archival and retrieval mechanisms, and will make data available to scientists for analysis and visualization on demand.

What impact will it have?

Kosar and his team intend to make this emerging PetaShare technology available to all scientists and engineers who deal with large amounts of distributed data. They intend to make this instrument a generic solution to the data handling problem that scientists are facing in collaborative research. Several companies in the storage industry have already indicated that such a technology, if developed properly, would have strong potential for commercialization in the future.

How is it funded?

This project was recently funded by a $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Who is involved in this project?

More than 25 senior researchers from five Louisiana institutions, with research areas spanning 10 different disciplines, are actively involved in this project. The PetaShare development team involves researchers with profound expertise in distributed data handling and storage, Grid computing, high-performance data mining and visualization.

The LSU faculty involved in PetaShare project include Kosar, Gabrielle Allen, Ed Seidel, S.S. Iyengar, Brygg Ullmer, Bijaya Karki and Evangelos Triantaphyllou., Robert Twille, and William Wischusen.