The U.S. Department of Energy has just announced the selection of Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility as the lead for its new High Performance Data Facility Hub. Jefferson Lab will partner with DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to form a joint project team led by Jefferson Lab. The HPDF will be a $300-500 million computing and data infrastructure resource that will provide transformational capabilities for data analysis, networking and storage for the nation’s research enterprise. It will provide researchers with tools, methods and technologies to maximize the scientific value of data.
“We are honored to be selected by the DOE’s Advanced Scientific Computing Research program to lead this project,” said Jefferson Lab Director Stuart Henderson. “Building on our extensive experience with large data sets and high performance computing, and our new and ongoing partnerships exploring state-of-the-art approaches to data and data science, we will build a new facility that will revolutionize the way we make scientific discoveries.”
Vast amounts of research data are generated by major scientific user facilities, supercomputer simulations and artificial intelligence tools every day. The mission of the HPDF will be to accelerate the pace of scientific discovery by providing researchers the ability to seamlessly access data from a wide range of sources and scientific facilities – even in real time – applying state-of-the-art computational capabilities on a high performance computing platform, while in a secure environment.
“Our partnership with Berkeley Lab will help ensure geographic resilience and innovative infrastructure for this unique facility in support of researchers across the United States. Jefferson Lab looks forward to working with our colleagues at Berkeley Lab and our other national lab partners to develop and deploy state-of-the-art data management infrastructure, capabilities and tools with HPDF,” Henderson said.
The HPDF will be organized as a “hub-and-spoke” model, with the lead infrastructure to be located at Jefferson Lab and mirrored at the Berkeley Lab site. “Spoke” sites will be based on the successful Jefferson Lab-Berkeley Lab model.
HPDF will function as a new scientific user facility that specializes in advanced infrastructure for data-intensive science. This facility will provide unprecedented data analysis, networking and storage resources. Scientists and engineers working in DOE Office of Science programs will have competitive access to these dedicated and geographically diverse resources as they address fundamental research problems that require swift, shared access to large and complex data sets.