Indiana University Helps NASA Manage Big Data

Indiana University has contributed Big Data expertise and infrastructure to NASA’s Operation IceBridge, a decade-long polar ice monitoring project.

For the past four years, IU Research Technologies, a cyberinfrastructure and service center affiliated with the Pervasive Technology Institute (PTI), has provided IT support for the Center for Remote Sensing of Ice Sheets (CReSIS), a National Science Foundation Science and Technology Center led by the University of Kansas. Kansas scientists provide NASA with the radar technology that measures the physical interactions of polar ice sheets in Greenland, Chile and Antarctica. IU experts bring innovative data management and storage solutions to the missions.

Essentially, IU has built a supercomputer that can fly,” said Rich Knepper, manager of IU’s campus bridging and research infrastructure team within Research Technologies. “During this current mission, our system provided analysis of radar data as the data was collected – in real time — allowing mission scientists to see the ice bed information as the plane flies over the Arctic.”

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