Program

Industrial and experimental research and development

The Target program consists of industrial and experimental research and is aimed at developing essential components for commercial intelligent information systems.

Target consists of:

• state-of-the-art ICT infrastructure for computing, storage and communication
• infrastructural testbed for Scalable Systems which is also used by a number of major scientific data-intensive projects
• Valorisation of parts of experimental research for specific market applications

Triangular knowledge cluster

In this way Target is realising a knowledge cluster in which:

 

• private parties with specific questions from the market want to precompetetively deploy the Target knowledge

• parties jointly develop new knowledge and skills based on the questions from the market in order to attract more market parties

• the knowledge-bearers of the Target groups within the RUG (the Donald Smits Center for Information Technology and the OmegaCEN group) and ASTRON R&D put in capacity for large-scale data processing, as well as knowledge and expertise on operations of large-scale data files

• users of the Target knowledge, such as LifeLines, LOFAR and Artificial Intelligence, play a groundbreaking role in handling very large data flows, and thus offer a research and development platform (testbed) based on which commercial questions can be researched and validated

• parties jointly position themselves for future assignments from large international scientific facilities (ESA, SKA, etc.)  

The Target knowledge cluster forms a triangle among the commercial partners, who want to perform specific research and development based on market demand; the knowledge bearers in the Target group, who can help perform this R&D; and the current first-user groups of the Target knowledge, who for now are based in the academic sector as "early-followers". Together this forms an ideal platform for the purposes of starting market development and validating the market value. This is a schematic representation of the knowledge cluster.

Market demand

The private partners formulated the following research goals:  

• Improving the scalability and operations of distributed 1+ Petabyte storage systems (IBM)
• Developing intelligent solutions to bring about the link between large-scale information systems and storage systems (Oracle, IBM)
• Innovating and improving the link between work flow systems and large-scale storage systems (Task24)
• Developing operating environments for massive data processing, analysis and retrieval, with a focus on long term sustainability/preservation (Oracle, IBM and Task24)
• Developing and innovating improved scalability in the 100+ Terabyte regimen for database performance (Oracle)
• Developing intelligent search machines for very large data files with complex connections (Heeii BV )