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Second Generation Data Cloud Announced at SC07
A second generation Data Cloud called Sector was announced this week at the SC 2007 conference in Reno, NV. Cloud computing is a critical piece of the infrastructure that allows companies such as Google, Yahoo, Amazon and Microsoft to provide their services. A cloud provides computing resources or services over the Internet. A storage cloud provides storage services; a data cloud provides data management services; and a computing cloud provides computational services. Often these are layered to create a stack of cloud services that provide a computing platform for developing cloud-based applications. 
Until now, data clouds all used the standard Internet to link distributed computing resources. At SC 07, the National Center for Data Mining (NCDM) at UIC announced a second generation data cloud called Sector that uses high performance, wide area 10 Gbps networks. The foundation for Sector Data Cloud is the 10 Gbps Teraflow Network, a joint project of the NCDM and the International Center for Advanced Internet Research (iCAIR) at Northwestern University. "Data clouds have emerged as the preferred platform for distributed computing when working with large amounts of data," said Robert Grossman, Director of the National Center for Data Mining at the University of Illinois at Chicago and Managing Partner of Open Data Group. According to Grossman, "Sector is the first of a second generation of data clouds that are based on new network protocols designed to work with the very large data sets that are common in e-science and that are beginning to become more common in e-business." Sector is an open source data cloud based on the NCDM developed UDP-based Data Transfer (UDT) protocol that enables even very large data sets to be transported efficiently over high performance wide area networks. "We have extensively used the Sector Data Cloud and the Teraflow Network to distribute multi-terabyte astronomical datasets to the whole world. We are also working to implement large-scale streaming queries across large astronomical archives to support the users of the National Virtual Observatory," said Alexander Szalay, Professor of Astrophysics and Computer Science at the Johns Hopkins University.
Until now, data clouds all used the standard Internet to link distributed computing resources. At SC 07, the National Center for Data Mining (NCDM) at UIC announced a second generation data cloud called Sector that uses high performance, wide area 10 Gbps networks. The foundation for Sector Data Cloud is the 10 Gbps Teraflow Network, a joint project of the NCDM and the International Center for Advanced Internet Research (iCAIR) at Northwestern University. "Data clouds have emerged as the preferred platform for distributed computing when working with large amounts of data," said Robert Grossman, Director of the National Center for Data Mining at the University of Illinois at Chicago and Managing Partner of Open Data Group. According to Grossman, "Sector is the first of a second generation of data clouds that are based on new network protocols designed to work with the very large data sets that are common in e-science and that are beginning to become more common in e-business." Sector is an open source data cloud based on the NCDM developed UDP-based Data Transfer (UDT) protocol that enables even very large data sets to be transported efficiently over high performance wide area networks. "We have extensively used the Sector Data Cloud and the Teraflow Network to distribute multi-terabyte astronomical datasets to the whole world. We are also working to implement large-scale streaming queries across large astronomical archives to support the users of the National Virtual Observatory," said Alexander Szalay, Professor of Astrophysics and Computer Science at the Johns Hopkins University.