The UK government has announced an investment of £186 million to boost scientific and technological development in eight key areas, including £34 million for new data research and four administrative data centers. This investment aims to help the UK gain an advantage in the global technology race. The focus will be on using new data through the University of Southampton's work in engineering, geotechnology, and related fields. As technology enables more data to be created faster, the ability to store and analyze large amounts of data must also increase to enable new discoveries.

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Government Boost for Data Technology
Research
As companies become more high-tech, generate larger quantities of
data, seek ever larger banks of storage facilities and turn to
innovations like the cloud, it seems clear that the future belongs to
those who can use this technology best.

2. This appears to be the view of the government, which has announced
an investment package of £186 million to boost scientific and
technological development in eight key areas. One of these is a £34
million spend on the creation of a new data research network and four
administrative data research centres, which ministers believe will help
the UK gain a lead over its rivals in the global technological race.
Other projects supported cover areas such as meteorology, synthetic
biology, cancer research in London, clinical research in Glasgow,
engineering and the transfer of new technology and products to
developing countries.

3. Science minister David Willetts said: "The British scientific and
technological revolution is something to be proud of. By investing in
these eight great technologies I firmly believe that the UK will continue
to be at the forefront of the global technology race.
"We are one of the most efficient research nations, and we get the best
returns on our investment. We are investing to help translate our
excellent science into commercially successful technologies which in
turn boosts our businesses, creates jobs and drives economic growth."

4. The focus of the development of new data usage will be on the
University of Southampton and will run in parallel with its work in
engineering and geotechnology. The institution will be seeking to help
the UK expand its role in the maritime, marine, aerospace, rail and
structural engineering sectors. The Higher Education Funding Council
for England, through which the government grants are being
channelled, said this will be "underpinned and complemented by
computational and data handling facilities."
Indeed, the issue of how to handle big data has been growing. As long
as technology can increasingly create more information at faster
speeds and in ever increasing volumes, so the capacity to store it and
analyse it rises accordingly.

5. For this reason, IBM has just launched its Accelerated Discovery Lab,
which it describes as a new collaborative system that is designed to
enable its users "find unknown relationships from disparate data sets".
Listing areas of research such as biology, medicine, finance, weather
modelling, mathematics, computer science and information technology
among those it is designed to serve, IBM said the new workspace will
enable analytic models to be used to process data faster than the
"traditional pace of discovery".

6. Director for strategy and programme development at the IBM Research
Accelerated Discovery Lab Jeff Welser commented: “If we think about
big data today, we mostly use it to find answers and correlations to
ideas that are already known. Increasingly what we need to do is figure
out ways to find things that aren’t known within that data."
He explained this in terms of Moore's law on big data, which is that
what matters is not how much this is growing, but what uses can be
made of it.

7. The use of more data storage and analytical facilities is, therefore,
something that new scientific and other research can benefit from. An
outstanding case of this is Cern, the organisation whose huge
laboratory under the Alps consists of the huge Hadron Collider and a
vast bank of computers analysing the immense quantities of data
produced.
Having discovered evidence for the existence of the Higgs Boson, the
collider his currently out of action as it cools down before being brought
back into use for more research in 2015. Cern's head of infrastructure
Tim Bell recently told the Structure Europe conference that with 100
megapixel cameras taking 40 million pictures per second each time a
particle collision is conducted, huge amounts of extra capacity will be
needed.

8. As a result, Cloudpro reported in September, when the collider comes
back into action it will be making use of a new data storage facility near
Budapest that can offer another 5.5 petabytes of space for the new
data generated at Cern.
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". Government Boost for Data Technology Research. October
11,2013. Storetec.