STEM

Faculty Awarded Air Force Grant to Supercharge Information Fusion

Friday, January 27, 2017, By Matt Wheeler

Faculty in the College of Engineering and Computer Science have been awarded a $295,000 grant by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research to introduce dynamic data to the design of information fusion systems to accelerate the processing of large amounts of data.

Associate Professor Jian Tang, Professor Biao Chen and Distinguished Professor Pramod K. Varshney will evaluate information fusion, including sensing/data collection, information processing and the fusion objectives, as well as interaction among different layers of the hierarchy. Ultimately, they intend to develop a computational platform that enables scalable stream data processing for real-time information fusion.

The team will combine a custom-built Storm, a widely used distributed computing framework with the powerful processing power of a graphics processing unit (GPU) cluster—creating what they call G-Storm. In doing so, they expect to dramatically increase the system’s speed. They will test, evaluate and report on their findings.

This project represents original research effort on distributed fusion of heterogeneous stream data and will result in a first-of-its-kind distributed GPU-accelerated platform to enable low-latency information fusion.