We’ll be talking about virtual observatories for big data today with Argonne National Lab’s Dr. Kate Keahey. We’ll discuss the concept of a facility for online data analysis that can support ongoing experiments and other time-critical scientific projects—a facility equipped to deal with millions of sensors, many terabytes of data, and the computational resources required to tackle such problems. Kate provides details about what the virtual observatory architecture looks like and offers more background here: http://www.exascale.org/bdec/sites/www.exascale.org.bdec/files/whitepapers/keahey.pdf