The article "A ‘Big Data’ Freeway for Scientists" by John Markoff appeared the March 20, 2013 issue of the New York Times. The article profiles Larry Smarr, director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) at the University of California, San Diego. The article concerns Big Data, a U.S. government initiative that recognizes the need to improve scientists' ability to extract knowledge and insights from large and complex collections of digital data.

The article concludes by mentioning a presentation Smarr gave last month at Calit2, in which he did a collaborative session with EVL to demonstrate how very-high-speed networks will facilitate the ability to share data and scientific visualization information among scientists. Calit2's large tiled display wall was connected to EVL's CAVE2™ System, and both displays were running SAGE (the Scalable Adaptive Graphics Environment developed by EVL). Smarr spoke with EVL's Professor Andrew Johnson and several EVL graduate students, and they shared scientific visualizations of Big Data.

More specifically, today, data can be stored anywhere - processed elsewhere - and analyzed somewhere else. As the article states, "Increasingly, computers used by scientific researchers are starting to escape the boundaries of a single box or even cluster and spread out to become 'virtual,' in some cases across thousands of miles." Though his campus has a high-speed research network to locations in the U.S. and worldwide, Smarr is helping re-engineer it to achieve a 10-fold improvement, or 100 Gigabits per second (Gbps). UIC recently upgraded its campus' research network to 100Gbps with major support from the National Science Foundation. In particular, the UIC Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) has 100Gbps into its lab, and its many devices, including the new CAVE2™ Hybrid Reality System, connect to this backbone.

Read the New York Times article.

Watch a video of the Smarr's 45-minute collaborative session with EVL.