{"174131":{"#nid":"174131","#data":{"type":"news","title":"Georgia Tech Wins $2.7 Million to Advance Big-Data Technology for DARPA","body":[{"value":"\u003Cp\u003EA research team at the Georgia Institute of Technology has received a $2.7 million award from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop technology intended to help address the challenges of \u0022big data\u0022 \u2013 data sets that are both massive and complex.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EThe contract is part of DARPA\u2019s XDATA program, a four-year research effort to develop new computational techniques and open-source software tools for processing and analyzing data, motivated by defense needs. Georgia Tech has been selected by DARPA to perform research in the area of scalable analytics and data-processing technology.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EThe Georgia Tech team will focus on producing novel machine-learning approaches capable of analyzing very large-scale data. In addition, team members will pursue development of distributed computing methods that can process data-analytics algorithms very rapidly by simultaneously utilizing a variety of systems, including supercomputers, parallel-processing environments and networked distributed computing systems.\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003E\u0022This award allows us to build on the foundations we\u0027ve already established in large-scale data analytics and visualization,\u0022 said Richard Fujimoto, Regents\u0027 Professor and chair of Georgia Tech\u2019s School of Computational Science and Engineering (CSE),\u0026nbsp; and leader of the Georgia Tech team. \u0022The algorithms, tools and other technologies that we develop will all be open source, to allow them to be customized to address new problems arising in defense and other applications.\u0022\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EUnder the open-source paradigm, collaborating developers create and maintain software and associated tools. Program source code is made widely available and can be improved by a community of developers and modified to address changing needs.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EThe XDATA award is part of a $200 million multi-agency federal initiative for big-data research and development announced in March. The initiative is aimed at improving the ability to extract knowledge and insights from the nation\u0027s fast-growing volumes of digital data. Numerous big-data-related research endeavors are underway at Georgia Tech, and the institute recently established the Center for High-Performance Computing and the Center for Data Analytics and Machine Learning.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EThe Georgia Tech XDATA effort will build upon foundational methods and software developed under the Foundations of Data and Visual Analytics (FODAVA) research initiative, a 17-university program led by Georgia Tech and funded by the National Science Foundation and the Department of Homeland Security.\u0026nbsp; The FODAVA effort has produced the Visual Information Retrieval and Recommendation System (VIZIRR) and a research test bed.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003E\u0022The FODAVA document retrieval and recommendation system uses automated algorithms to give users a range of subject-search choices and information visualization capabilities in an integrated way, so that users can interact with the data throughout the problem-solving process to produce more meaningful solutions,\u0022 said Haesun Park, a School of Computational Science and Engineering professor and FODAVA director.\u0026nbsp; \u0022For XDATA, we will enhance these visualization and interaction capabilities and develop distributed algorithms that allow users to solve problems faster and on a larger scale than ever before.\u0022\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EAlso participating from the School of Computational Science and Engineering is Alex Gray, an associate professor who has developed open-source software tools to make machine-learning algorithms scalable to large datasets. Other faculty members involved in the XDATA work include professor Hongyuan Zha and associate professor Guy Lebanon.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EInvestigators from the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) will also contribute to the XDATA initiative. Senior research scientists Barry Drake and Richard Boyd will tackle the computational demands of processing the machine-learning algorithms developed by the School of Computational Science and Engineering team.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EGTRI\u0027s task involves enabling these algorithms to run on a networked distributed computing system. By configuring the software so that it operates on multiple processors simultaneously, the researchers believe they can ensure that the algorithms solve problems very rapidly \u2013 a requirement of the DARPA award.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003E\u0022Scaling up machine-learning algorithms to big-data requirements is a relatively new area of research, and there will be both hardware and software issues to address here,\u0022 said Drake, a specialist in parallel algorithms in numerous application domains. \u0022In enabling these complex codes to analyze large data sets rapidly, we expect to be breaking new ground.\u0022\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EBoyd will support XDATA\u0027s hardware requirements with expertise on low-cost graphics processing units (GPUs), which offer performance levels reached only by supercomputers until recently. Clusters of linked GPUs could help provide the processing power needed to satisfy XDATA requirements.\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003E\u0022The XDATA vision involves providing an entirely new set of open-source data-processing tools for both military and other requirements,\u0022 Boyd said. \u0022We have to be prepared to deal with not only widely distributed computing, but also with heterogeneous data that could be structured or unstructured. Diverse hardware approaches including GPUs are likely to be part of the system.\u0022\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EFor more information on DARPA and the XDATA program, visit \u003Ca href=\u0022http:\/\/www.darpa.mil\u0022 title=\u0022www.darpa.mil\u0022\u003Ewww.darpa.mil\u003C\/a\u003E. \u0026nbsp;\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003E\u003Cstrong\u003EResearch News \u0026amp; Publications Office\u003C\/strong\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cstrong\u003EGeorgia Institute of Technology\u003C\/strong\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cstrong\u003E177 North Avenue\u003C\/strong\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cstrong\u003EAtlanta, Georgia\u0026nbsp; 30332-0181\u003C\/strong\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cstrong\u003EMedia Relations Contacts\u003C\/strong\u003E: John Toon (404-894-6986)(\u003Ca href=\u0022mailto:jtoon@gatech.edu\u0022\u003Ejtoon@gatech.edu\u003C\/a\u003E), Joshua Preston (404-385-3845)(\u003Ca href=\u0022mailto:jpreston@cc.gatech.edu\u0022\u003Ejpreston@cc.gatech.edu\u003C\/a\u003E) or Lance Wallace (404-407-7280)(\u003Ca href=\u0022mailto:lance.wallace@gtri.gatech.edu\u0022\u003Elance.wallace@gtri.gatech.edu\u003C\/a\u003E).\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003E\u003Cstrong\u003EWriter\u003C\/strong\u003E: Rick Robinson\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003Cbr \/\u003E\u003C\/p\u003E","summary":null,"format":"limited_html"}],"field_subtitle":"","field_summary":[{"value":"\u003Cp\u003EA research team at the Georgia Institute of Technology has received a $2.7 million award from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop technology intended to help address the challenges of \u0022big data\u0022 \u2013 data sets that are both massive and complex.\u003C\/p\u003E","format":"limited_html"}],"field_summary_sentence":[{"value":"Georgia Tech has received $2.7 million to develop technology to address the challenges of \u0022big data.\u0022"}],"uid":"27303","created_gmt":"2012-11-29 12:08:15","changed_gmt":"2016-10-08 03:13:18","author":"John Toon","boilerplate_text":"","field_publication":"","field_article_url":"","dateline":{"date":"2012-11-29T00:00:00-05:00","iso_date":"2012-11-29T00:00:00-05:00","tz":"America\/New_York"},"extras":[],"hg_media":{"174111":{"id":"174111","type":"image","title":"XDATA - Richard Fujimoto","body":null,"created":"1449179012","gmt_created":"2015-12-03 21:43:32","changed":"1475894816","gmt_changed":"2016-10-08 02:46:56","alt":"XDATA - Richard Fujimoto","file":{"fid":"195807","name":"fujimoto2.jpg","image_path":"\/sites\/default\/files\/images\/fujimoto2_0.jpg","image_full_path":"http:\/\/hg.gatech.edu\/\/sites\/default\/files\/images\/fujimoto2_0.jpg","mime":"image\/jpeg","size":1221022,"path_740":"http:\/\/hg.gatech.edu\/sites\/default\/files\/styles\/740xx_scale\/public\/images\/fujimoto2_0.jpg?itok=EEZIWrHq"}},"174121":{"id":"174121","type":"image","title":"XDATA - Haesun Park","body":null,"created":"1449179012","gmt_created":"2015-12-03 21:43:32","changed":"1475894816","gmt_changed":"2016-10-08 02:46:56","alt":"XDATA - Haesun Park","file":{"fid":"195808","name":"park1.jpg","image_path":"\/sites\/default\/files\/images\/park1_0.jpg","image_full_path":"http:\/\/hg.gatech.edu\/\/sites\/default\/files\/images\/park1_0.jpg","mime":"image\/jpeg","size":1418626,"path_740":"http:\/\/hg.gatech.edu\/sites\/default\/files\/styles\/740xx_scale\/public\/images\/park1_0.jpg?itok=I-GRgQRg"}}},"media_ids":["174111","174121"],"groups":[{"id":"1304","name":"High Performance Computing (HPC)"}],"categories":[{"id":"153","name":"Computer Science\/Information Technology and Security"}],"keywords":[{"id":"15092","name":"big data"},{"id":"654","name":"College of Computing"},{"id":"208","name":"computing"},{"id":"690","name":"darpa"},{"id":"33301","name":"data analytics"},{"id":"51811","name":"distributed computing"},{"id":"416","name":"GTRI"},{"id":"9167","name":"machine learning"},{"id":"5155","name":"open source"},{"id":"25461","name":"Richard Fujimoto"},{"id":"51791","name":"XDATA"}],"core_research_areas":[{"id":"39431","name":"Data Engineering and Science"}],"news_room_topics":[],"event_categories":[],"invited_audience":[],"affiliations":[],"classification":[],"areas_of_expertise":[],"news_and_recent_appearances":[],"phone":[],"contact":[{"value":"\u003Cp\u003EJohn Toon\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EResearch News \u0026amp; Publications Office\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003E(404) 894-6986\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003E\u003Ca href=\u0022mailto:jtoon@gatech.edu\u0022\u003Ejtoon@gatech.edu\u003C\/a\u003E\u003C\/p\u003E","format":"limited_html"}],"email":["jtoon@gatech.edu"],"slides":[],"orientation":[],"userdata":""}}}