August 27, 2008
High-Stakes DICE Roll From San Diego to Chapel Hill
Updated August 27, 2008 at 6 p.m.
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is crowing about a faculty and research coup: It has captured the Data Intensive Cyber Environments group, known as DICE, from the University of California at San Diego’s Supercomputer Center. The new East Coasters consist of 10 people, including a star computer scientist, Reagan Moore.
An additional four DICE members are remaining in San Diego, at the university’s Institute for Neural Computation, said Jose-Marie Grifffiths, dean of North Carolina’s School of Information and Library Science, the group’s new home base. All 14 members, however, voted to make the switch, Ms. Griffiths said.
The DICE group has garnered a world-class reputation for open-source software that allows data sharing among researchers, publication in digital libraries, and preservation of data in archives. The group’s members are working on research projects currently financed at more than $10-million.
The team has developed data-management systems that spread big computer projects among many machines, including systems for the Southern California Earthquake Center, the TeraGrid, the Worldwide University Network, and the California Digital Library-Digital Preservation Repository.
Mr. Moore and two other principal investigators will have tenured faculty positions at North Carolina. They and the other DICE members will continue to focus on ways to organize the deluge of data now being created in a number of disciplines by scientists and scholars — scientists and scholars who have discovered that while computers are great at producing information, organizing it is another matter altogether. —Josh Fischman
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