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About
Science Tools Corporation
History
| Mission | Philosophy
| Viewpoints Introducing Science Tools Corporation
Meet the Science Tools Principals. Contacting Us:
Our History: When the NASA "Mission to Planet Earth" was first being developed, the scientific community was up in arms over the Hughes Aerospace plan to manage the resulting scientific data. From the ruckus they created, NASA funded several "EOS-DIS Alternative Architecture Studies." One of those was known as Sequoia 2000, headed by Professor Michael Stonebraker at UC Berkeley, and also including Turing-Award winner Jim Gray. (Please see EOSDIS Alternative Architecture Technical Report 95/61, April 1995, Sequoia 2000 Technical Report, 617 Soda Hall, Berkeley CA 94720, 510-642-4662) The goal was to provide a system capable of managing all of the earth science data from EOS-DIS from end-to-end and to specifically address the needs of five explicit earth science disciplines. This work was successful and led to a prototype effort known as BigSur. Our founder, Richard Troy, was brought in from the commercial database community to lead the project because of his reputation for producing quality systems. The BigSur Project was successful, too, and as time moved forward, one day the telephone rang. Richard McGinnis was on the line, the Director of the Langley DAAC. In short, McGinnis asked Richard to commercialize his University-BigSur research and thus Science Tools was born. Through the summer of 1997, we implemented BigSur at Langley and it went into production, on schedule, on September 1st, 1997. In the years that have passed since The BigSur System™ went into production in September 1997, Langley has continued to use our products in daily production service. BigSur is the core of their system and manages all of their production of scientific data-products on an Origin 2000 series super-computer - LaRC refers to these as PGEs. They have reported to us as recently as August, 2002 that they still have yet to encounter a single bug in our products in all these years. They also report that LaRC has never experienced a single moment of system down time attributable to our products. They are a good reference as to the quality of our work and we can provide contact information. Since that time, Science Tools has continued to develop and enhance our product suite addressing the needs of the scientific enterprise and our offerings today are comprehensive. We are sensitive to the needs of our clients and have added significant, sophisticated enhancements, especially in the realm of security. These investments have led to the successful addition of other important clients such as the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. At the time of the founding of the company, Earth Science was reasonably well funded and Science Tools did rather well, but as a new administration entered in 2000, Earth Science funding has dropped dramatically; From the last year of Clinton to the last year of Bush, including the devaluation of the US dollar, Earth Science suffered almost exactly a 50% drop in funding from the US Federal Government - by far the largest funder of Earth Science in the world. With this shrinking market, as a small player in a market dominated by very large (mostly military-related) corporations, Science Tools revenue dropped pricariously and in 2008 the company officially folded. The assets were sold for debt relief; the new holders of the assets created a new Science Tools Corporation and worked out an arrangement to retain the former company's founder, Chief Scientist and lead programmer: Richard Troy. The company has a new focus, The Life Sciences, and had been working mostly in the area of moving medical research to clinical settings. Our Mission:
Our Philosophy:
Some Viewpoints:
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