This award from the Chemistry Research Instrumentation and Facilities (CRIF) Program and the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program will enable the Department of Chemistry at Purdue University to acquire a shared facility for rapid access and analysis of massive data blocks, known as RAMDATA. The facility will allow research groups to process massive data blocks (i.e., 100 to 10,000 gigabytes) and greatly facilitate new image studies at the light sources at Brookhaven and Argonne National Laboratories as well as reaction studies at the Alternating Gradient Synchrotron (AGS) and Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) particle accelerators. An important prerequisite for success in accelerator-based research is a facility for accessible storage and fast processing of large data blocks. For example, in nuclear reaction studies, modern devices for high resolution three dimensional tracking of the trajectories of reaction products yield several terabytes (trillion bytes) of data output for a typical experiment. Meanwhile, data generation is continuing to grow at an even faster rate. High speed, high volume data handling capabilities are needed in a wide variety of disciplines, ranging from astronomy to particle physics.
