About RDAV, the “eyes” of XSEDE
RDAV is the University of Tennessee’s Center for Remote Data Analysis and Visualization sponsored by the National Science Foundation as part of the TeraGrid XD. NSF started the TeraGrid project in 2001 to pursue the goal of making high-performance computing available to the national scientific community. Today, the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE), formerly TeraGrid, is the world’s largest, most comprehensive distributed cyberinfrastructure for open scientific research and is entering a new phase of operation focused on providing American researchers and educators with the capability to work with extremely large amounts of digitally represented information.
Scientists and engineers are daily producing terabytes of digital data through experimentation, observation and simulation. RDAV’s purpose is to aid in the significant challenge of transforming these data into knowledge and insight by providing scientists with well-engineered and well-supported remote visualization, analysis, and scientific workflow technologies. As “eyes” of XSEDE, we empower scientists to see and understand massive amounts of data and greatly enhance the nation’s capabilities for scientific discovery.
The services deployed by RDAV are tightly integrated with UT’s National Institute of Computational Sciences (NICS) which is co-located with the Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) National Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS) on the campus of Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). The hardware resources available include Nautilus, a new SGI shared-memory machine featuring 1024 cores and 4 terabytes of memory, and Kraken, currently the fastest, most powerful supercomputer for academic use. A wide range of software tools is available for data analysis, visualization and scientific workflow.
RDAV is a partnership between the NICS, ORNL, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the University of Wisconsin, and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois.
