Zzzoot

When Google and IBM last October announced their Internet-Scale Computing Initiative - which looked to dedicate a cluster of 1600 computers for the use of researchers, for free - it was not clear (to me) whether this was a U.S.-only initiative, or was also available (or would eventually become available) to non-U.S. researchers: The University of Washington was the first to join the initiative. A small number of universities will also pilot the program, including Carnegie Mellon University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Maryland. In the future, the program will be expanded to include additional researchers, educators and scientists. Now with the NSF's announcement that they are partnering with Google and IBM in this initiative in what they are calling the Cluster Exploratory (CluE), it is even less clear (or maybe more clear that is only available to U.S. researchers??), with the NSF re...

USC 's Information Sciences Institute has been awarded $13.8M for this project , which aims to solve the massive data glut that swamps many disciplines by automating scientific workflows . Using grid computing and other advanced technologies (such as A.I. and Semantic Web ), a workflow architecture allows for the capture of complex scientidic workflows and their application in a distributed fashion on data sets in an efficient manner. This is a very ambitious (and well funded) project. Some of the (even more) interesting parts of this project include (from the article): "...investigate mechanisms to support autonomous and robust execution of concurrent workflows over continuously changing data...learning techniques to improve the performance of the workflow system by exploiting an episodic memory of prior workflow executions." episodic memory (Wikipedia)