BiG Grid: Dealing with data

The ongoing development of new measuring equipment, computational methods, digitalization opportunities and high throughput technologies is changing the face of science. In virtually all areas of research, scientists are facing an unprecedented data explosion. From astronomy to social sciences, from earth sciences to humanities and from particle physics to life sciences – dealing with data has become the ultimate challenge for scientists all around.

BiG Grid, the Dutch e-science grid, allows scientists to meet current and future challenges that relate to management, storage, processing and analysis of all this data and information. Through focusing on both the hardware resources and supporting and building communities, BiG Grid offers access to a highly advanced ICT research infrastructure that benefits the scientific community at large. Dealing with data is our expertise. Using BiG Grid will not only facilitate your data handling activities, but even more important, it provides you with an excellent opportunity to reveal and extract the knowledge hidden in the data. And in the end, that is what data generation is all about.

Benefits of BiG Grid

Access to advanced, large-scale computing and storage facilities
New ways to collaborate and share data with researchers working in different locations
Support in designing scientific workflows that fully exploit the potential of the grid infrastructure
Opportunities to scale up your computational research
Assistance in porting applications to the grid
Advise and support on the migration from research to e-science

Organisation

BiG Grid spans two activities: building, developing and maintaining the large scale infrastructure on the one hand and on the other providing support and development advice to (potential) users. The BiG Grid Executive Team coordinates both activities. In addition, two dedicated teams focus on the detailed operations concerning BiG Grid's main activities. The operations team is responsible for the infrastructure and the installation and running of the compute and storage systems. The support and development team is responsible for the analysis, design and implementation of the software environment. The support and development also acts as liaison with the user communities and is in charge of developing new application leads.

More information on the BiG Grid website: www.biggrid.nl