The AstroStat Slog

Woncheol Jang pointed me to the following web site describing a proposal opportunity at DOE that may be of interest to readers of this list:

Mathematics for Analysis of Petascale Data
http://www.science.doe.gov/grants/FAPN09-10.html

The Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR) of the Office of Science (SC), U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), hereby announces its interest in receiving grant applications for research addressing the mathematical challenges involved in extracting insights from extremely large datasets (“petascale data”) and investigating fundamental issues in finding key features and understanding the relationships between those features.
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All applications should address the potential for advances in mathematical methods or numerical algorithms and not just the application of methods and algorithms to a specific science problem, no matter how challenging.
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This solicitation seeks applications for basic research in mathematical models, methods and tools for the representation, analysis, and understanding of petascale data.

They specifically mention data from physics simulations and observational data from cosmology as examples in the description.

Letters of Intent (required) are due 15 April, proposals are due 29 May. $4M is available for FY09; awards may be for up to 3 yr.

Hyunsook recently said that she wished that there were “some astronomical data depositories where no data reduction is required but one can apply various statistical analyses to the data in the depository to learn and compare statistical methods”. With the caveat that there really is no such thing (every dataset will require case specific reduction; standard processing and reduction are inadequate in all but the simplest of cases), here is a brief list: Continue reading ‘Reduced and Processed Data’ »