A vast amount of scientific knowledge is inaccessible to the scientific community due to the lack of computational resources or tools for small laboratories to share or analyze experimental results. With a new grant from the National Science Foundation, the eScience Institute will collaborate with leading institutions to look for ways that software can bring this data out of hiding, revealing untapped value in the “long tail” of scientific research.

The two-year, $500,000 planning grant enables investigators at the Computation Institute (a joint initiative between the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory), University of California, Los Angeles, University of Arizona, University of Washington and University of Southern California to lay the groundwork for a proposed Institute for Empowering Long Tail Research as part of the NSF’s Scientific Software Innovation Institutes program. Researchers will engage with scientists from fields such as biodiversity, economics and metagenomics to determine the optimal solutions for the increasingly challenging data and computational demands upon smaller laboratories.

The University of Washington and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory have announced the creation of the Northwest Institute for Advanced Computing, a joint institute based at the UW that will foster collaborative computing research between the two institutions.

"The expanded partnership between UW and PNNL will create tremendous new opportunities for both organizations,” said Ed Lazowska, professor of computer science and engineering. “Big data is transforming the process of discovery in all fields. UW and PNNL have significant and complementary strengths."

Read the UW press release here. Read the PNNL press release here.