Research

IDIES research centers around the generation and analysis of very large scientific datasets. Several online databases have been developed (each screenshot links to the online database it describes):

	Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS): complete data on more than 300 million stars and galaxies
	Life Under Your Feet: data from one of the world's largest sensor network deployments, which measures variables in the soil such as temperature and water pressure
	Public Turbulence Data Cluster: an online resource in which researchers can query a large-scale simulation of hydrodynamic turbulence; the cluster is an entirely new way to interact with large datasets

JHU is also the lead institution for the U.S. National Virtual Observatory, an effort to make all the astronomy datasets in the country seamlessly searchable online

IDIES researchers are building the science database for Pan-STARRS, a telescope project to find killer asteroids that will generate more than a petabyte of data by the end of 2009, and are involved in the even larger Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, which will generate hundreds of petabytes. IDIES researchers are also building a 20 TB database for the world's largest cosmology simulation, Via Lactea-II.

JHU is part of the Open Cloud Consortium, which is exploring the boundaries of the newly emerging cloud computing paradigm, connected with a special high-speed network to Chicago and beyond.

IDIES researchers are also involved in other data-intensive engineering and science projects, such as:

• Innovative simulations of earthquake formation, at the state of the art level
• Collaborating with the JHU School of Medicine on OncoSpace, a new concept for large analytic databases to be used in radiation oncology
• Offering a postdoctoral fellowship program funded by the Moore and Keck Foundations for six postdocs working in innovative projects related to data-intensive computing
• Collaborating with the JHU Sheridan Libraries on an overlay Journal for data for the astronomy community