New University of Utah center offers some serious computing muscle to handle 'extreme data'

SALT LAKE CITY — A picture may be worth a thousand words, but in the fields of science, they can be worth billions and billions of bytes of information.

A few years ago, then Hewlett-Packard CEO Mark Hurd said "more data will be created in the next four years than in the history of the planet." Hurd's prediction was understated. Studies have showed that humanity has created more computer data than all documents in the entire past 40,000 years — and that was in 2007.

Housed within tall whirring towers of servers at the University of Utah's Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute are mind-boggling amounts of information: global weather data, chemistry combustion simulations on space shuttle heat shield panels, or physics experiments, just to name a few.

Computer science professor Valerio Pascucci holds an iPad in his hands with what looks like a gray rock canyon. The iPad is tied wirelessly into the more powerful computer servers, which process the image. Using his fingers to pinch-zoom out, the canyon turns out to be the corner of an eye; further out, a face, a head, and so forth — it's a super-detailed image of Michelangelo's "David."

Using this image, one can zoom in and see the marks of how the marble was chiseled. Focusing on one of the sculpture's calves, Pascucci shows how someone had even carved his initials into the famous statue, hundreds of years ago.

It was not too long ago that scientists stored their data in tables, bound in paper volumes. But with an explosion in advancements in science and computing, researchers have, in a way, become the victims of their own success.

"Now, it would be impossible because you wouldn't have enough paper to do that, let alone go through the data and understand it," Pascucci said.

From engineering and cosmology, to chemistry and medicine, the demand for super computing to make sense of vast quantities of data has become intense.

Pascucci, along with colleague Giorgio Scorzelli, helped to create the Center for Extreme Data Management Analysis and Visualization this past summer at the university. Funding for the center was approved by the Utah Board of Regents.

The center will serve as a resource to help scientists make sense of their data using super computers.