Extreme Big Data (EBD): Next generation big data infrastructure technologies towards yottabyte/year

Abstract

Our claim is that so-called "Big Data" will evolve into a new era with proliferation of data from multiple sources such as massive numbers of sensors whose resolution is increasing exponentially, high-resolution simulations generating huge data results, as well as evolution of social infrastructures that allow for "opening up of data silos", i.e., data sources being abundant across the world instead of being confined within an institution, much as how scientific data are being handled in the modern era as a common asset openly accessible within and across disciplines. Such a situation would create the need for not only petabytes to zetabytes of capacity and beyond, but also for extreme scale computing power. Our new project, sponsored under the Japanese JSTCREST program is called "Extreme Big Data", and aims to achieve the convergence of extreme supercomputing and big data in order to cope with such explosion of data. The project consists of six teams, three of which deals with defining future EBD convergent SW/HW architecture and system, and the other three the EBD co-design applications that represent different facets of big data, in metagenomics, social simulation, and climate simulation with real-time data assimilation. Although the project is still early in its lifetime, started in Oct. 2013, we have already achieved several notable results, including becoming world #1 on the Green Graph 500, a benchmark to measure the power efficiency of graph processing that appear in typical big data scenarios.