New Data Access Challenges for Data Intensive Research in Russia

The goal of this survey is to analyze the global trends for development of massive data collections and related infrastructures in the world aimed at the evaluation of the opportunities for the shared usage of such collections during research, decision making and problem solving in various data intensive domains (DIDs) in Russia. The representative set of DIDs selected for the survey includes astronomy, genomics and proteomics, neuroscience (human brain investigation), materials science and Earth sciences. For each of such DID the strategic initiatives (or large projects) in USA and Europe aimed at creation of big data collections and the respective infrastructures planned up to 2025 are briefly overviewed. The IT projects aimed at the development of the infrastructures supporting access to and analysis of such data collections are also briefly overviewed. The paper concludes with an idea of organizing in Russia of a target interdisciplinary program for the development of the pilot project of the distributed infrastructure and platform for the access to various kinds of data in the world, storage of data and their analysis during research in various DIDs. As a part of such infrastructure, the program should also include development of the high performance interdisciplinary center for data intensive applications support in various DIDs. This survey is intended also to serve as a basis for the panel discussion at the International Conference DAMDID/RCDL’2015.