NSF has an account for Major Research Equipment and Facilities Construction (MREFC), to support the development of very large research instruments. Typically, the goal of these instruments, which may cost hundreds of millions of dollars to build and tens of millions of dollars annually to operate, is to find answers to some of the most fundamental questions in science today. For example, LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory) is designed to detect ripples in space-time caused by changes in very large masses (e.g., a star exploding). Such observations, if made successfully, would finally confirm Einstein’s prediction of the existence of gravitational waves. LIGO has a construction cost of about $300M and […]

The CCC “Big Data Computing Study Group” helped organize two adjacent events in Sunnyvale in March: the “Hadoop Summit” and the “Data-Intensive Scalable Computing (DISC) Symposium”. The Hadoop Summit was an open event, hosted by Yahoo! Research. Its goal was to build a community among users of the open-source Hadoop software suite for distributed programming in the map-reduce style. About 350 people attended, a much larger crowd than originally expected. The DISC Symposium was an invitation-only event (~125 attendees) whose goal was to build a community among DISC researchers. The presentations at the Hadoop Summit were fascinating. While they varied greatly in technical depth, in total they gave a sense […]

Welcome to the weblog for the Computing Community Consortium! In its founding documents, the CCC describes its goals as follows: The challenge for the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is to catalyze the computing research community to debate longer range, more audacious research challenges; to build consensus around research visions; to evolve the most promising visions toward clearly defined initiatives; and to work with the funding organizations to move challenges and visions toward funding initiatives. All great goals. But how do we set about accomplishing them? While it is still early days for the CCC, a number of very interesting proposals for “visioning” have already been generated by the research community, […]