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Posted by Tom Kalil on March 29, 2012 at 09:23 AM EDT [Editor's Note: Watch the live webcast today at 2pm ET of the Big Data Research and Development event athttp://live.science360.gov/bigdata/ ] Today, the Obama Administration is announcing the "Big Data Research and Development Initiative."

VisIt is a free interactive parallel visualization and graphical analysis tool for viewing scientific data on Unix and PC platforms. Users can quickly generate visualizations from their data, animate them through time, manipulate them, and save the resulting images for presentations. VisIt contains a rich set of visualization features so that you can view your data in a variety of ways. It can be used to visualize scalar and vector fields defined on two- and three-dimensional (2D and 3D) structured and unstructured meshes. VisIt was designed to handle very large data set sizes in the terascale range and yet can also handle small data sets in the kilobyte range. See the table below for more details about the tool's features.

The Planetary Data System (PDS) is an archive of data products from NASA planetary missions, which is sponsored by the NASA Office of Space Science. We actively manage the archive to maximize its usefulness, and it has become a basic resource for scientists around the world. All PDS-produced products are peer-reviewed, well-documented, and easily accessible via a system of online catalogs that are organized by planetary disciplines

The world's largest set of data on human genetic variation - produced by the international 1000 Genomes Project - is now publicly available on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud, the National Institutes of Health and AWS jointly announced today. The public-private collaboration demonstrates the kind of solutions that may emerge from the Big Data Research and Development Initiative announced today by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) during an event at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C.

ParaView is an open-source, multi-platform data analysis and visualization application. ParaView users can quickly build visualizations to analyze their data using qualitative and quantitative techniques. The data exploration can be done interactively in 3D or programmatically using ParaView's batch processing capabilities. ParaView was developed to analyze extremely large datasets using distributed memory computing resources. It can be run on supercomputers to analyze datasets of terascale as well as on laptops for smaller data.

Vis5D is a system for interactive visualization of large 5-D gridded data sets such as those produced by numerical weather models. One can make isosurfaces, contour line slices, colored slices, volume renderings, etc of data in a 3-D grid, then rotate and animate the images in real time. There's also a feature for wind trajectory tracing, a way to make text anotations for publications, support for interactive data analysis, etc.

VORPAL enables researchers to simulate complex physical phenomena in less time and at a much lower cost than empirically testing process changes for plasma and vapor deposition processes. VORPAL offers a unique combination of physical models to cover the entire range of plasma simulation problems. Ionization and neutral gas models enable VORPAL to bridge the gap between plasma and neutral flow physics. VORPAL software runs on a wide range of computing platforms, from desktop machines to massively parallel supercomputers with thousands of processors. The use of standard data formats allows data analysis at various levels of sophistication, including your own preferred data analysis tool. VORPAL is used by scientists and engineers to simulate the physical behavior of devices and processes for many industrial and research applications, including laser wakefield accelerators, plasma thrusters, high-power microwave guides, and plasma processing chambers.

GenMAPP is a free computer application designed to visualize gene expression and other genomic data on maps representing biological pathways and groupings of genes. Integrated with GenMAPP are programs to perform a global analysis of gene expression or genomic data in the context of hundreds of pathway MAPPs and thousands of Gene Ontology Terms (MAPPFinder), import lists of genes/proteins to build new MAPPs (MAPPBuilder), and export archives of MAPPs and expression/genomic data to the web.

The Multimission Archive at STScI (MAST) is a NASA funded project to support and provide to the astronomical community a variety of astronomical data archives, with the primary focus on scientifically related data sets in the optical, ultraviolet, and near-infrared parts of the spectrum.

The US Nuclear Data Program (USNDP) collects, evaluates, and disseminates nuclear physics data for basic nuclear physics and for applied nuclear technology communities in the United States.

The Kepler Project is dedicated to furthering and supporting the capabilities, use, and awareness of the free and open source, scientific workflow application, Kepler. Kepler is designed to help scien­tists, analysts, and computer programmers create, execute, and share models and analyses across a broad range of scientific and engineering disciplines. Kepler can operate on data stored in a variety of formats, locally and over the internet, and is an effective environment for integrating disparate software components, such as merging "R" scripts with compiled "C" code, or facilitating remote, distributed execution of models. Using Kepler's graphical user interface, users simply select and then connect pertinent analytical components and data sources to create a "scientific workflow"-an executable representation of the steps required to generate results. The Kepler software helps users share and reuse data, workflows, and compo­nents developed by the scientific community to address common needs.

For the average biologist, hands-on literature mining currently means a keyword search in PubMed. However, methods for extracting biomedical facts from the scientific literature have improved considerably, and the associated tools will probably soon be used in many laboratories to automatically annotate and analyse the growing number of system-wide experimental data sets. Owing to the increasing body of text and the open-access policies of many journals, literature mining is also becoming useful for both hypothesis generation and biological discovery. However, the latter will require the integration of literature and high-throughput data, which should encourage close collaborations between biologists and computational linguists.

In the past decade, there have been remarkable advances in proteomic technologies. Mass spectrometry has emerged as the preferred method for in-depth characterization of the protein components of biological systems. Using mass spectrometry, key insights into the composition, regulation and function of molecular complexes and pathways have been gained. From these studies, it is clear that mass-spectrometry-based proteomics is now a powerful 'hypothesis-generating engine' that, when combined with complementary molecular, cellular and pharmacological techniques, provides a framework for translating large data sets into an understanding of complex biological processes.