APPLICATION OF HIGH-PERFORMANCE COMPUTING TO THE MANAGEMENT OF SOCIAL-SCIENCE AND DEMOGRAPHIC-DATA

The costs of conducting censuses and surveys have always been high. No netheless, demographic, social, environmental, and health scientists h ave found it possible to gather quantities of data that far exceed the capabilities of any contemporary computing technology to extract full y the information contained in the data. Recent developments in comput ing and information science technology offer the promise of supporting innovative approaches to managing and analyzing data that can dramati cally increase the ease of access to the information hidden within the se data. This presentation describes a highly integrated system of dat a, metadata, instructional tutorials, hardware, and software designed to minimize the technical barriers to working with large and complex d ata sets. The objective is to provide easy, low-cost, fast, and meanin gful access to these data for a broad spectrum of users.