Energy Secretary Steven Chu announced a $25 million five-year initiative to help scientists better extract insights from today’s increasingly massive research datasets, the Scalable Data Management, Analysis, and Visualization (SDAV) Institute. SDAV will be funded through DOE’s Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing (SciDAC) program and led by Arie Shoshani of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). As one of the nation’s leading funders of basic scientific research, the Department of Energy Office of Science has a vested interested in helping researchers effectively manage and use these large datasets.

SDAV was formally announced March 29 as part of the Obama Administration’s "Big Data Research and Development Initiative," which was announced this morning and takes aim at improving the nation’s ability to extract knowledge and insights from large and complex collections of digital data.

SDAV is a collaboration tapping the expertise of researchers at Argonne, Lawrence Berkeley, Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos, Oak Ridge and Sandia national laboratories and in seven universities: Georgia Tech, North Carolina State, Northwestern, Ohio State, Rutgers, the University of California at Davis and the University of Utah. Kitware, a company that develops and supports specialized visualization software, is also a partner in the project. SDAV will be funded at $5 million a year for five years. The project builds on technologies built by previous SciDAC projects in the areas of scientific data management and scientific visualization and analytics, and applied to various application domains.

Read the University of Utah Press Release