SCE’s Praveen Rao, Assistant Professor  in Computer Science, has been awarded funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to pursue a 3 year (July 2011 to June 2014)  project titled Scalable RDF Query Processing Using a Cloud Infrastructure.  Professor Rao is the Principal Investigator for this project. In recent years, RDF technologies have become increasingly important in domain-specific applications. These technologies provide the ability to reason over semantic data and are highly appealing in domains such as WWW, healthcare, defense and intelligence, biopharmaceuticals, and so forth.

Because of the rapidly growing size of RDF datasets, it is vital to develop new techniques for RDF data management.  Several companies have started worrying about hitting the “trillion triples” mark and are designing RDF stores on shared-nothing clusters.   Meanwhile, cloud computing is emerging as a new paradigm for next generation software and services. The ability to acquire a large number of computing and storage resources on-demand enables massive parallel processing of data. Today, it is easy and cheap for anyone with a credit card and access to the Internet to rent computing resources (e.g., servers, storage, network bandwidth) from a cloud provider and run software and deploy applications. Motivated by these trends, this project called RiC (RDF in the Cloud), will address the problem of massive RDF data management in a cloud, by developing novel techniques — algorithms and data structures — for storing, indexing, and query processing. 

The grant funding was awarded by NSF’s Division of Information & Intelligent Systems (IIS) under the Directorate for Computer & Information Science & Engineering (CISE) at NSF.  This project will engage both undergraduate and graduate students, including women. The project website is currently under construction.