SciDB

Society depends on scientists all across the globe to meet some of the world's most important challenges. Making significant improvements on such challenges as global warming, cancer, communicable diseases, etc. depend on the world's best scientists working as productively as possible. Over the past 30 years, science -- like business and government -- has become more automated and data-intensive. The scope of many scientific experiments would not be possible without cutting-edge information technologies. Unfortunately, the majority of information technologies have been developed to meet the needs of business -- not science -- and as a result, scientists are forced to either retrofit business information technologies to suit their needs or to build their own technologies with very limited resources.

Inspired by the late Jim Gray -- who advocated for similar projects for many decades -- SciDB, Inc. is building an open source database technology product designed specifically to satisfy the demands of data-intensive scientific problems. With the advice of the world's leading scientists across a variety of disciplines including astronomy, biology, physics, oceanography, atmospheric sciences, and climatology, our computer scientists are currently designing and prototyping this technology.

SciDB will be supported by individuals and institutions who believe that the future of science can be better served with specialized data analysis tools, over those developed primarily for business purposes. The scientists that are participating in our open source project believe that the SciDB database -- when completed -- will dramatically impact their ability to conduct their experiments faster and more efficiently and further improve the quality of life on our planet by enabling them to run experiments that were previously impossible due to the limitations of existing database systems and infrastructure. Many of the world's leading computer scientists with expertise in database systems have contributed to the design and architecture of the system to meet the needs of the world's scientists.