Scientific Data Management and Analysis at Extreme Scale

The Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR) of the Office of Science (SC), U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), hereby announces its interest in receiving applications from interdisciplinary teams of Computer Science/Applied Mathematics/Statistics/Computational Science researchers in the areas of Scientific Data Management and Analysis at Extreme Scale. Multi Institutional applications with cohesive emphasis on transformational discoveries that address key challenges in analysis and management of scientific data at extreme scale are encouraged. Partnerships among academic institutions, National Labs, and industry are strongly encouraged. Science has shifted from data scarcity to an overwhelming abundance of data, as simulations and experiments generate many petabytes of data, with some sciences facing exabytes of data near term. For example, a recent report states that climate model data are growing faster than the data set size for any other scientific discipline, with collections of hundreds of exabytes expected by 2020 (Challenges in Climate Change Science and the Role of Computing at the Extreme Scale, http://extremecomputing.labworks.org/climate/report.stm, and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is expected to produce roughly 15 petabytes of data annually over its estimated 15 year lifespan. (http://public.web.cern.ch/Public/en/LHC/Computing-en.html) The value of scientific data is realized only when data are effectively analyzed and results are presented to the science community, policy makers, and the public in an understandable way. The challenges of analyzing massive scientific data sets are compounded by data complexity that results from heterogeneous methods and devices for data generation and capture and the inherently multi-scale, multi-physics nature of many sciences, resulting in data with hundreds of attributes or dimensions and spanning multiple spatial and temporal scales. The combination of massive scale and complexity is such that high performance computers will be needed to analyze data, as well as to generate it through modeling and simulation. This Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) calls for innovative basic research in computer science for management and analysis of extreme-scale scientific data in the context of petascale computers and/or exascale computers with heterogeneous multi-core architectures. The activities supported by this FOA may be a combination of basic research, creation of algorithms for advanced architectures, and development of usable data management and analysis tools for scientific discovery. Partnerships among universities, National Laboratories, and industry are strongly encouraged.