The National Science Foundation's Computer System Research Program has awarded $500,000 to FastStor, a project focused on developing techniques for efficient information retrieval and information storage systems.
The South Dakota School of Mines and Technology is collaborating on the project with Auburn University, the University of Southern Mississippi, the U.S. Geological Survey's Center for Earth Resources Observation,\ and Science (EROS), the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, and Intel. Principal investigator for the School of Mines is Dr. Ziliang Zong (photo), assistant professor, and co-principal investigator is Dr. Manuel Penaloza, professor, both of the mathematics and computer science department.
The project sprung from a problem posed by the Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) center of the U.S Geological Survey in Sioux Falls. This center stores a tremendous amount of satellite image data on a variety of storage units and they are interested in finding ways to develop an efficient process to handle the numerous requests for data that they have. This project will attempt to use data mining to look for patterns in the information requested and then customize a storage retrieval process that will help optimize performance.
The School of Mines will receive $200,000 of the award to develop data mining algorithms to discover user data access patterns and implement data-mining-based multilayer prefetching mechanisms in hybrid storage systems.
