Where Data Is Coming From

Emerging directions in computing are likely to dramatically increase storage demands. Traditional drivers for storage-large databases, scientific data sets and general personal and institutional information needs-continue to increase, while new elements are likely to impose even greater, more complex needs. Such new elements include "collected" materials, i.e., digital libraries of textual documents, images, and video, as well as streaming data from widely distributed and widely varied networked sensors integrated with the physical world. With the continued miniaturization of CMOS technology, this last category may increase in scale at a rate similar to Moor's Law, rather than being limited by the pace of human creative activities, and will feed into higher level processing and storage.

There are many scholarly projects at UC Berkeley generating such large sources of data. Many of these are affiliated with the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS), a university-industry-state partnership that aims to create and harness information technology to tackle society's most critical needs. The PSI project seeks to provide a set of storage services to a collection of CITRIS projects whose progress is currently hampered by storage needs that cannot readily be addressed independently.

Centered at UC Berkeley, CITRIS sponsors research on conserving energy; education; saving lives, property, and productivity in the wake of disasters; boosting transportation efficiency; advancing diagnosis and treatment of disease; and expanding business growth through much richer personalized information services. Solutions to many of these problems have a common IT feature: At their core they depend on highly-distributed, reliable, and secure information systems that can evolve and adapt to radical changes in their environment, delivering information services that adapt to the people and organizations that need them. Not surprisingly, many of these projects are CISE-related, although they span disciplines from the traditional sciences to the humanities.