History of IDIES
IDIES was established in 2008 through the efforts of Dr. Alex Szalay, Dr. Charles Meneveau, and Dr. Sayeed Choudhury. With the onset of the information age, they recognized a gap between the large volumes of data being captured by researchers, and the resources and tools available to store and analyze that data. In this initial phase, funding support from JHU (KSAS and WSE) was combined with grant funding to create an incubator and testbed for big data infrastructure and storage.
In 2013, in recognition of the strategic importance of computing and data science across the entire university, JHU President Ron Daniels substantially broadened the scope of IDIES. This expansion included the buy-in and financial support of the President’s Office and five JHU divisions: KSAS, WSE, SOM, BSPH, and the Sheridan Libraries. IDIES became the leader in big data initiatives and responsible for the research computing efforts at JHU.
In 2015, JHU and UMCP, with IDIES, opened the Maryland Advanced Research Computing Center (MARCC), a world class research computing facility, with the support of a $30M grant from the State of Maryland.
Today, IDIES is a major interdisciplinary program, a large, diverse effort, where faculty and students work together to solve data-intensive problems, from genes to galaxies to materials science and urban planning.


IDIES Director Alex Szalay elected to National Academy of Sciences
IDIES Director Alex Szalay was among the 120 scientists elected as a member of the prestigious National Academy of Sciences for 2023.

Announcing the 2023 IDIES Summer Student Fellows
In its commitment to nurturing the already burgeoning growth of student-led data-intensive research at Johns Hopkins, The Institute for Data Intensive Engineering and Science (IDIES) has the privilege of providing

Announcing the 2023 IDIES Seed Funding Awardees
Every fall, The Institute for Data Intensive Engineering and Science (IDIES) offers its members the chance to receive up to $25,000 in grant funding for eligible data-intensive research projects.

IDIES 2022 Research Funding Opportunities
For the ninth year, the Institute of Data Intensive Engineering and Science (IDIES) will offer its Seed Funding Initiative. IDIES Seed research funding offers faculty and research teams a one-year, $25,000 pilot award for data-intensive computing projects in order to promote the growth of data-intensive, multidisciplinary, multi-investigator sponsored projects at Johns Hopkins University.

Maryland Advanced Research Computing Center ready for June launch
The Maryland Advanced Research Computing Center (MARCC) promises to deliver a hefty digital punch; with ~500 TFLOPs sustained peak performance, the center ranks as one of the top HPC sites

SciServer Featured in NSF’s Discoveries
NSF Publishes SciServer: Big Data infrastructure for science SciServer, an IDIES project to build a Big Data infrastructure, creating data access and analysis tools useful to all areas of science,

Three IDIES affiliates have been named among Thompson Reuters highly cited researchers in 2014
In 2014, the company Thomson Reuters has created a new list of the top most highly cited researchers. Out of 3,215 named scientists in the world, 29 are from Johns

Tapping into Big Data
The Following Article Appears in the Spring 2014 issue of Johns Hopkins University’s Arts & Sciences magazine The secrets of hundreds of millions of galaxies and stars are stored in