CC* Data Storage: Cardinal Academic Research Data Storage (CARDS)

This project establishes the Cardinal Academic Research Data Storage (CARDS) infrastructure at the University of Louisville. CARDS allows the management and sharing of petabyte-scale institutional data, eliminates existing storage performance bottlenecks, and supports research across various priority areas including artificial intelligence and machine learning, digital pathology, space observation, cancer growth simulation, and materials modeling. In addition, CARDS promotes intra-campus collaborations among faculty by bringing domain scientists with large datasets together with statistics, engineering, and computer science faculty for enhanced data analysis and knowledge discovery. The information accumulated in CARDS provides a rich resource to create cross-disciplinary projects for graduate students, and integrating CARDS into local REU site programs scales the offerings available to undergraduate students nationwide. CARDS is critical to enable scientific and engineering advances in the state-of-the-art by allowing the testing and development of new dynamic caching and tiering techniques for distributed data storage platforms. The data in CARDS helps create unique artificial intelligence models for enhanced navigation, obstacle avoidance, and path planning in autonomous systems, as well as improved image analysis for digital pathology. CARDS facilitates the production of new machine learning based detection mechanisms for coronal mass ejection events, and non-invasive methods to assess blocked coronary arteries using computational modeling. CARDS enables the generation of computational models for cancer chemotherapy and tumor growth, and novel, high-performance materials for next-generation applications in nano-electronics, neuromorphic computing, and energy storage. This award by the Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure is jointly supported by the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR). This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.