The National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded a grant, in the expected amount of $736,987, to Stan Zdonik and Ugur Cetintemel to conduct research towards building a scientific database (SciDB), a system designed and optimized to support data-driven scientific applications. The aim of SciDB is to do for science what relational databases did for the business world, namely to provide a high performance, commercial-quality and scalable data management system appropriate for many science domains.
In contrast to existing database systems, SciDB is based on a multidimensional array data model and includes multiple features specific to and critical for science: provenance, uncertainty, versions, time travel, science-specific operations, and in situ data processing. No existing system offers all these features in a general, highly scalable and usable engine. SciDB will thus significantly advance the state-of-the-art in data management in addition to supporting domain scientists in data-driven discovery.
This grant is part of a $2.4M Large NSF grant that also funds research teams in University of Washington, MIT, Portland State University and University of Wisconsin-Madison.
