SciServer: Big Data infrastructure for science

Big Data comes naturally to science. Every year, scientists in every field, from astronomy to zoology, make tremendous leaps in their ability to generate valuable data.

But all of this information comes at a price. As datasets grow exponentially, so do the problems and costs associated with accessing, reading, sharing and processing them.

A new project called SciServer, supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF), aims to build a long-term, flexible ecosystem to provide access to the enormous data sets from observations and simulation.

`SciServer will help meet the challenges of Big Data,` said Alex Szalay of Johns Hopkins University, the principal investigator of the five-year NSF-funded project and the architect for the Science Archive of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. `By building a common infrastructure, we can create data access and analysis tools useful to all areas of science.`

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