Jimmy Lin Leads NSF Research Infrastructure Grant

Jimmy Lin, an associate professor in the iSchool and UMIACS, was just named principal investigator of a Computing Research Infrastructure (CRI) grant from the National Science Foundation.

The three-year, $500,000 award will establish a Hadoop NextGen computing cluster at UMIACS, significantly advancing the institute’s collective work in big data and scientific computing.

“These types of awards are particularly important, as they foster interactions amongst faculty and students on a rich class of problems, and can catalyze a community around a computing facility,” says Amitabh Varshney, director of UMIACS.

Hadoop is open source software that enables the distributed processing of large data sets across clusters of commodity servers. It is designed to scale up from a single server to thousands of machines, with a very high degree of fault tolerance.

Faculty in the Computational Linguistics and Information Processing (CLIP) lab—one of 15 centers and labs in UMIACS—expect to use the new Hadoop cluster for research, education and innovation focused on machine learning, real-time streaming
 computations and graph processing.

The NSF funding will also allow UMIACS researchers to explore algorithms for content analysis, as well as for modeling implicit and latent relationships between heterogeneous content (text, images, graphs, etc.) at scale. And, the platform will allow researchers to exploit novel hardware architectures for data-intensive computing in Graphics Processing Units and solid state drives.

UMIACS faculty from CLIP named as collaborators in the NSF grant are Hal Daumé, Philip Resnik, Naomi Feldman, Doug Oard and Louiqa Raschid. Other UMIACS faculty involved are Larry Davis, Joseph JaJa, Hanan Samet, Mihai Pop and Amol Deshpande.

Over time, Lin expects to engage UMIACS faculty in cybersecurity, the geophysical sciences, bioinformatics and more to make use of the Hadoop computing cluster.