By Dan Sweeney, Sun Sentinel
The National Science Foundation has awarded Florida Atlantic University $600,000 to create a Big Data Training and Research Lab on its Boca Raton campus. "I was extremely happy when I heard," said Taghi Khoshgoftaar, the computer science professor who received the grant. "If you're doing data analytics and you don't have the computer resources, you are really handicapped.''
Big Data refers to the collection of incredibly vast amounts of information that requires supercomputers with blazing processing speeds and terabyte after terabyte of storage capacity. The grant money, along with another $297,000 kicked in by the university, will be used to upgrade the computer systems in FAU's current Data Mining lab. But it will be four or five months before the upgrades are in place.