NWO granted two FOCUS subsidies to CWI researchers. FOCUS is the open part of the Bsik programme BRICKS, which has been developed by CWI and NWO Physical Sciences to stimulate fundamental computer science research. The programme will deliver important building blocks for the computer of the future.
One FOCUS subsidy was granted to the project 'Distributed Implementations of Adaptive Collective Decision Making', coordinated by Krzysztof Apt from the PNA1 research theme. The project aims at computer science aspects of collective decision making mechanisms in economics. These are under growing influence of grid computing and electronic commerce. The SEN3 and SEN4 research themes are also involved in this project.
The project 'Cracking a Scientific Database', coordinated by Martin Kersten of the INS cluster received the second FOCUS subsidy. The project aims at a better equipment of database management systems for the support of very large - petabyte - databases and complex distributed query processing. Examples are the astronomical databases of the Sloan Digital SkyServer and Astro-Wise.
The GLANCE subsidy was granted for the project 'Workflow Management for Large Parallel and Distributed Applications (WoMaLaPaDiA)', coordinated of Natalia Sidorova of the Technische Universiteit Eindhoven. This project aims to bridge the gap between two important application areas of complex software systems: workflow management and grid computing. The SEN3 research theme of CWI will contribute to this project from its expertise in coordination languages.
