The Sector/Sphere Project

The Sector/Sphere project was initiated at the National Center for Data Mining in 2006 as a research project to manage very large datasets over wide area networks. The project was supported in part by the National Science Foundation. Dr. Robert Grossman is the PI of the related research grants. Dr. Yunhong Gu is the architect and lead developer.

NCDM developed the majority of the Sector/Sphere open source software as of today. Other contributions were made from the Open Cloud Consortium, VeryCloud, and many community contributors.

Community support and contributions to the open source development are welcome (see How to Contribute).

Disclaimer: this web site is maintained by the Sector development group (the Sector Alliance) and the content does not necessarily represent the view of our sponsors and contributors.

National Center for Data Mining

The National Center for Data Mining (NCDM) at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) was established in 1998 to serve as a resource for research, standards development, and education for high performance and distributed data mining and predictive modeling.

The NCDM is supported, in part, by the National Science Foundation, the Chicago Bioinformatics Consortium, the Department of Defense, and the University of Illinois at Chicago, as well as by other funding agencies and NCDM's industrial partners.

[The staff members of NCDM who originally work on Sector have relocated to Univ. of Chicago and became part of the Institute for Genomics & Systems Biology.]

Open Cloud Consortium

The Open Cloud Consortium (OCC) is a member driven organization that:

1. Supports the development of standards for cloud computing and frameworks for interoperating between clouds;
2. develops benchmarks for cloud computing;
3. supports reference implementations for cloud computing, preferably open source reference implementations;
4. manages a testbed for cloud computing called the Open Cloud Testbed;
5. sponsors workshops and other events related to cloud computing.