Data-intensive Computing
Description:
In high energy physics, bioinformatics, computational astronomy, computational biology, material sciences, archeology, oceanography and many other disciplines, people encounter applications involving numerous, loosely coupled jobs that both access and generate large data sets. When the data to be accessed and processed are voluminous, we refer to the computation as data intensive. These large-scale data-intensive problems normally need to harness geographically distributed resources and greater processing power in multiple network-linked heterogeneous computer architectures exploit the best features of each for a given problem.
Enablers:
- Recent advances in database
- Technogical advances in parallel programming
- Web services
- .NET technologies
- Software for interactive control of programs and instruments
- Scientific applications in areas such energy physics, bioinformatics, computational astronomy, computational biology, material sciences, archeology, and oceanography.
Inhibitors:
- Limitted large computational systems, data storage and specialized experimental facilities.
- Scheduling difficulty in distributed environment: i.e resource utilization, response time, global and local allocation policies.
Paradigms:
There has been enormous concern about the consequences of human population growth for the environment and for social and economic development. But this growth is likely to come to an end in the foreseeable future.
Experts:
United Nations US Department of Health and Human Services
Timing:
Improving on earlier methods of probabilistic forecasting, here we show that there is around an 85 per cent chance that the world's population will stop growing before the end of the century. There is a 60 per cent probability that the world's population will not exceed 10 billion people before 2100, and around a 15 per cent probability that the world's population at the end of the century will be lower than it is today. For different regions, the date and size of the peak population will vary considerably.