Brown CS News

Stan Zdonik and Ugur Cetintemel Receive NSF Grant to Develop Data Management System for Massive Scale Scientific Data

    Brown CS community members continue to win noteworthy grants and awards. To read more articles click here.

    The National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded a grant, in the expected amount of $736,987, to Stan Zdonik and Ugur Cetintemel to conduct research towards building a scientific database (SciDB), a system designed and optimized to support data-driven scientific applications. The aim of SciDB is to do for science what relational databases did for the business world, namely to provide a high performance, commercial-quality and scalable data management system appropriate for many science domains.

    In contrast to existing database systems, SciDB is based on a multidimensional array data model and includes multiple features specific to and critical for science: provenance, uncertainty, versions, time travel, science-specific operations, and in situ data processing. No existing system offers all these features in a general, highly scalable and usable engine. SciDB will thus significantly advance the state-of-the-art in data management in addition to supporting domain scientists in data-driven discovery.

    This grant is part of a $2.4M Large NSF grant that also funds research teams in University of Washington, MIT, Portland State University and University of Wisconsin-Madison.