SPATIAL DATA ANALYSIS LIBRARY
Stony Brook University/Emory University
co-PI: Fusheng Wang

Support of high performance queries and analytics on large volumes of spatial data has become increasingly important in many application domains, including geospatial problems in numerous disciplines, location based services, and emerging medical imaging applications. There are two major challenges for managing and analyzing massive spatial data: the explosion of spatial data, and the high computational complexity of spatial data processing. Our goal is to develop a general library to support high performance spatial queries and analytics for both 2D and 3D spatial big data that can be fully integrated into MIDAS middleware to take advantage of various big data platforms.

MIDAS
Rutgers University
co-PI: Shantenu Jha

As part of the SPIDAL Project, the RADICAL team at Rutgers is developing a MIddleware for Data-intensive Analysis and Science (MIDAS) to support the wide range of applications and analytics algorithms that SPIDAL must support. These application and analytics algorithms must execute efficiently on current and future generation supercomputers and cloud platforms, yet must not be bound too tightly to a specific platform. Given the rapid changes in the infrastructure and platforms, performance must not come at the cost of portability, extensibility and flexibility. On the other hand the complexity and overhead of multiple levels of functionality, indirection and abstractions must be avoided. It is the role and responsibility of MIDAS to determine a "sweet spot" between the two extremes.
In the short term we will work with application teams to provide "fast integration" to support the applications. The RADICAL team will also work with Indiana University to integrate MIDAS with the advanced analytics algorithms and libraries (SPIDAL) to provide scalable and interoperable implementations as they are being developed. As SPIDAL is developed by the project applications, MIDAS will thus provide a "deeper integration" for the applications.

CINET: A Cyber Infrastructure for NETwork Science
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
co-PI: Madhav V. Marathe

Networks are an effective abstraction for representing real systems. Consequently, network science is increasingly used in academia and industry to solve problems in many fields. Computations that determine structure properties and dynamical behaviors offer insights into the characteristics of real systems. CINET is an open-access, web-based tool for analyzing networks that represent interactions in large-scale complex systems. It was developed at Virginia Tech and partially funded by NSF to provide a large set of networks and the algorithms to analyze them. Users can also add their own networks to be analyzed by the provided algorithms. The web-based interface has been designed to simplify analysis of complex networks for users who are not necessarily computer scientists. CINET has the following features: (i) it offers realistic networks from the literature and various random and deterministic network generators; (ii) it provides many algorithmic modules and measures to study and characterize networks; (iii) it is designed for efficient execution of complex algorithms on distributed high performance computers so that they scale to large networks; and (iv) it is hosted with web interfaces so that even non-computing experts without direct access to high performance computing resources can still reap the system benefits.