Mission & History

The DICE mission is to evaluate results-oriented solutions for high performance computing (HPC) and information technology (IT) challenges, data centers and vendors, while seeking greater insight through innovative leadership.
The DICE vision is to: 1) Strengthen and advance American competiveness in the use of HPC and IT by evaluating and accelerating delivery of effective innovations to the community.  2) Strengthen the HPC and IT communities through collaborative efforts to communicate requirements, services and emerging solutions among vendors, government and academia.

DICE Core Values

  • People are our most important resource.
  • We are dedicated to satisfaction driven by the goal of exceeding commitments to our customers and collaborators.
  • Creativity and innovation are valued.
  • We are committed to excellence.
  • DICE works as a team and advocates teamwork.
  • Leadership, empowerment and accountability are essential.
  • We pursue the highest standards of ethical behavior.
  • We are committed to highest quality of service for the customer.

A Little History

DICE is the genesis of a vision by government, industry and academia to create collaboration that initiates innovation in the area of data management. Funding and in-kind contributions were secured from the Department of Energy (DOE), Department of Defense (DoD) and National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to initiate the DICE program in August of 2005.

After initial planning was completed by the DICE team and approved by the three contributing agencies, the DICE program concept was informally presented to a selected group of HPC vendors at the Supercomputing conference in November 2005 (SC05) in Seattle, Washington. The DICE concept received extensive backing and encouragement during the many informal discussions. In March 2006, a one day conference was held in Springfield, OH to present the DICE concept to the HPC community and to solicit feedback and input. Six months later in September 2006, the DICE test bed was formally established and project evaluations started. During the first year, seven project evaluations were undertaken and completed. Two of these projects were extended into the second year. During year two, 20 projects were submitted to the DICE team and 12 were recommended for approval. After considerable review and discussion, the DICE team was provided with a new set of priorities that asked the team to begin to evaluate projects in the area of data (information) lifecycle management (ILM) then focus on evaluation of data de-duplication products and then on storage security products. During this review period, the DICE team completed the evaluation of three network attached storage products. During late 2008 and throughout 2009, the DICE team installed and evaluated four ILM products, two data de-duplication products and started the evaluation of storage security products.  

DICE Today

As the DICE program evolved to meet new needs and opportunities, the program has stayed true to the belief that “DICE is all about game-changing BREAKTHROUGHS & EXPERIMENTS!” As an independent, third-party evaluator, DICE brings an unbiased view of technologies to the HPC and IT communities.  With its test bed and technical and program management team, DICE provides independent, trusted evaluations for vendors, data centers and technology innovators.  These evaluations bring reliable and credible results to customers requiring new installations, understanding of technologies and understanding the impact of a technology before it is placed into an environment.

DICE has expanded its services to include HPC data management technologies, but also IT technologies and power and cooling technologies.  In the area of data management, DICE continues to test and evaluate solutions in the four original DICE Challenge Areas:

  1. Data Locality: Data archive and access from different locations even though they may be stored at one primary location.
  2. Data Movement: Ability to move data efficiently and reliably to geographically dispersed systems and locations.
  3. Data Manipulation: Ability to change, search and manage data in local and distributed environments.
  4. Data Integrity: Ability to maintain the quality and security of data during transfer, access or storage.

 

Data Management Technology Evaluation & Support

Data management bottlenecks are impacting America’s ability to lead supercomputing and technology.  American industries must access, integrate, analyze and act on computational-intensive data more efficiently and economically than ever before.  
Driven by advancements in high-end computing technologies, more sophisticated models and increasingly complex analysis, data sets have exploded in size and complexity.  Researchers are tasked to run larger, more complicated simulations, with more iterations in less time and often over geographically dispersed areas with dissimilar architectures.  
Efforts are hindered by:

  • Data management bottlenecks with limited or delayed access and data manipulation
  • Limited or delayed access to data
  • Increased cost of data storage and management
  • Decreased usefulness of data
  • Locality of data versus compute resources
  • Inefficiency in accessing, manipulating and moving data safely and securely
  • Accessing relevant, critical data in a vast sea of data

By providing an integrated, geographically distributed test environment, DICE provides the capability to independently evaluate emerging technologies in a collaborative discreet partnership.  DICE supports the transformation of HPC innovations into trusted products and services, thus reducing the time-to-solution of complex, data intensive, scientific and engineering problems.