SCREMS: Building a Statistical Computing Environment to Support Scientific Research

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The Scientific Computing Research Environments for the MathematicalSciences grant provides crucial resources to the computinginfrastructure within the Department of Statistics at the Universityof California, Berkeley. The grant will fund the acquisition of afour-processor dual-core AMD Opteron compute-server, an Apple X-serve,a 1.5 terabyte Raid Tray with Network Attached Storage Appliance andtape drive. The compute server will be able to handle the heavy I/Oand memory requirements associated with processing and analyzing largedata sets. The heterogeneous nature of the Department's researchcomputing environment places complex demands on network filetransfer, and the network attached storage device will provide greaterreliability and functionality by supporting native file systemintegration across all platforms. The Apple Xserve running an Xgridcontroller will enable researchers to incorporate the Department'sIntel dual-core iMacs into the existing distributed computerinfrastructure.The computing equipment acquired under this grant will support severalinterdisciplinary research projects in astronomy, bioinformatics,genomics, and neuroscience. These projects bring with them heavycomputational demands due to processing large data sets, and they pushthe frontiers of statistical methodology and theory in support of theadvances in the application-specific problems. It is critical thatresearchers have the ability to move, store, and rapidly process largedata sets to support these collaborative research projects. Thesecollaborations include: the Taiwanese American Occultation Survey todetermine the distribution of comet-sized bodies in the Kuiper Belt;the Gamma-ray Large Area Telescope (GLAST), a $NASA$ mission to detectgamma-ray pulsars; the development of fast algorithms for datacompression for addressing the increasing prevalence of high-volumedata sets in modern scientific contexts; applications in neurosciencepertaining to in vivo experimentation of cortical neurons; and severalbioinformatics and genomics projects. The computing equipment willsupport the research programs of approximately twenty graduatestudents and seven post doctoral fellows. In addition, it will support theresearch of undergraduates involved in the Department's researchapprenticeship program.