The Petascale Active Data Store (PADS) project is a National Science Foundation (NSF) Major Research Infrastructure grant. Using the funds from NSF and the University of Chicago the project will acquire and operate a substantial data storage (~500 terabytes) and analysis system (9 teraflop/s) for the Computation Institute community.

This talk will provide an overview of the PADS project, including an update on the state of hardware and software. It will introduce the upcoming seminar series being held this fall and the class on data intensive computing to be held winter quarter. Finally it will open up for discussion the research issues associated with the project.