Grid Technologies for Social Science: the SAMD Project

The Seamless Access to Multiple Datasets (SAMD) project is designed to demonstrate the benefits of Grid (e-Science) technologies for dataset manipulation and analyses in a social science context. Grid technologies run over existing internet infrastructures and offer a faster alternative to the world wide web for the transfer and analysis of large datasets. Under the SAMD project, a web-delivered social science dataset was made available for large-scale data analysis through a Grid architecture. Using an exemplar problem drawn from the UK social science community, the project demonstrates how the integration of a single sign-on environment, Grid technologies and access to high performance computational resources can significantly speed up computationally intensive queries and streamline data gathering and analysis. The approach can be generalised to virtually any kind of problem involving data retrieval and analysis. The paper also discusses how this could allow social scientists to significantly scale up their quantitative research inquiries.