The main motivation behind the center was the rapid increasing availability of massive high-quality data, and the Desire to be able to access and process this data on many diverse computing platforms. The main high-level objective of the center was to significantly advance fundamental algorithmic knowledge in the massive data processing area.
We thank Reina Reimann and Nora Zokaite for comming up with the acronym for center (any resemblance to 'mad algorithms' is purely coincidental.