Lead investigators
Alán Aspuru-Guzik (Harvard Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology), Jonathan "Josh" Grindlay (CfA), John Huth (Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences), Lincoln Greenhill (Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics), Jeff Lichtman (FAS/Molecular & Cellular Biology, Center for Brain Science), Hanspeter Pfister (SEAS
), Pavlos Protopapas (Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences,
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
), Clay Reid (HMS/Neurobiology, Center for Brain Science), Margo Seltzer (Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences), Christopher Stubbs (Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences) and James Cuff (Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences)
Description
2007-08 DISC Chair: James Cuff, Director of Research Computing, FAS
2007-08 IIC Representative to DISC: Lincoln Greenhill, Senior Research Fellow, FAS
Many forefront projects underway or imminent in the physical and life sciences are producers of copious quantities of data at very high rates. Examples in which Harvard has a substantial stake include: Pan-Starrs (an optical wavelength, time-domain, all-sky survey telescope); the Murchison Widefield Array (a radio wavelength sky survey and early-universe telescope); the Large Hadron Collider (the next-generation TeV particle-physics facility at CERN); DASCH (“Digital Access to a Sky Century”, digitizing 500,000 images of 100 years of sky from the Harvard Plate Stacks); the Connectome (imaging and analysis to map the “wiring diagram” of the brain), and several projects involving chemical databases. The Data-Intensive Science Consortium (DISC) tackles challenges common to these programs, leveraging technological investment by Harvard’s schools and research groups, while simultaneously establishing Harvard as a leading world player in Research Computing. The DISC effort is key to lengthening Harvard’s lead in forefront areas of science including Astrophysics, Cosmology, Quantum Chemistry, Brain Science and Particle Physics. Success depends on dynamic development of interdisciplinary collaborations that challenge Harvard’s capability in high-end research computing.
Ongoing computational support for the DISC is provided via a strategic collaboration with Harvard’s constituent schools. At present, the FAS Research Computing group is the primary supplier of capability for the needed storage, retrieval and analysis platforms. The long-term goal of DISC is to enable cutting-edge science while, focusing on common design, HPC systems, storage architectures and toolkits that will enhance the Research Computing capabilities at Harvard as a whole. Typically, technologies developed and/or tested at IIC for DISC projects are deployed more widely within a few months of their proven stability.
