From the Office of Science and Technology Policy:
Today [18 July 2011], Microsoft is announcing the availability of a new tool called Daytona that will make it easier for researchers to harness the power of “cloud computing” to discover insights in huge quantities of data.
Daytona, which will be freely available to the research community, builds on an existing cloud computing collaboration between the National Science Foundation and Microsoft. In April, NSF announced that it was funding 13 teams to take advantage of Microsoft’s offer to provide free access to its Windows Azure cloud. Among other things, these projects will improve our understanding of large watersheds such as the Savannah River Basin, enable more and better use of renewable energy through improved weather forecasting, predict the interactions between proteins, and make cloud computing more secure, reliable, and accessible over mobile devices.
The new partnership, along with NSF collaborations with other leading IT companies, will help researchers access the computing power and storage capacity they need to tackle the big questions in their field. That’s important because researchers in a growing number of fields are generating extremely large data sets, commonly referred to as “Big Data.” For example, the size of DNA sequencing databases is increasing by a factor of 10 every 18 months! Researchers need better tools to help them store, index, search, visualize, and analyze these data, allowing them to discover new patterns and connections.
So far as I know, the issues of heterogeneous data remain largely unexplored in connection with BigData. Since heterogeneous data has proven problematic with “Small Data,” I not no doubt it will prove equally if not more difficult with Big Data.
This is the one of the offices to contact in the United States on such issues. Other US offices?
Similar offices in other countries?