The University of Illinois at Chicago has received a $1 million grant to build a new computing platform that can analyze large sets of data to help students and faculty address large-scale problems and explore new researching methods.
The three-year grant was given to UIC from the National Science Foundation, UIC announced Wednesday. The new platform, described as a “next-generation composable infrastructure computing system,” will be called COMPaaS DLV for Composable Platform as a Service Instrument for Deep Learning & Visualization. It will be developed and maintained by the college's Electronic Visualization Laboratory and will initially be available to UIC’s engineering faculty.
The platform will be designed to move, process and store data quicker, and be connected to UIC’s existing computing and network resources, the college said.
“The new system will allow researchers to create and utilize an in-demand computing platform that can rapidly learn to identify anomalies in large data sets and produce visualizations or extract features of interest from images, which will help them hone in on answers to research questions, and even tailor the questions themselves,” said Maxine Brown, director of the Electronic Visualization Laboratory and principal investigator on the grant, in a statement.
The computing system UIC uses now is designed for small-scale clusters of data, and though it is sufficient for moderately-sized projects, it's limited in how much data it can handle. The new platform will be able to handle much larger data sets, and allow researchers to compose their own temporary and on-demand computer systems that can analyze the specific data they’ll be using it for.
“Given it’s a more flexible system, researchers can more quickly analyze big data problems and possibly identify specific subsets of the data they want to focus on or abandon. It’s kind of like how when you get a box lunch, you are stuck with what’s inside that box,” said Andrew Johnson, the director of research at the college’s Electronic Visualization Laboratory and co-principal investigator of the grant. “A composable computer is more like a buffet, where you take as much of what you like and leave what you don’t want behind.”
UIC says one of the first projects it will use the new computing platform for is an anthropology project led by Meg Crofoot, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of California, Davis, that will allow her and others at UIC to use virtual reality to “walk inside their data” and study animal behavior.
