Hosted Processing Facility

Data, when stored in a large centralised archive, is generally of no use if it is not accompanied by a local processing capacity. There are many large science and commercial data archives. Too often, this data is the preserve of the data centre owner. Other members of the community are generally unable to access this data, quite apart from the problem of transferring (and storing) the huge quantities of data involved. This confinement of data is a major obstacle to the progress of research and business. A far more sensible and forward looking approach is to couple the archives to processing capacity, made available over the network. In this context, remote users upload their processing algorithms for local execution. Only the data-reduced result is then downloaded. This generates large savings for the data users. The resulting savings can be translated into subscriptions to this “hosted processing” service. The generalisation to all types of data centre is the innovation here.