News

The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) has announced an award of $9 million to a multi-institution team working on a three-year national initiative focused on creating the Interactive Discovery Laboratory (iDLab), a unified environment for research computing, data and scientific applications across several national computing centers and two cloud platforms.

The team, led by the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), includes researchers from the San Diego Supercomputer Center at UC San Diego Halıcıoğlu School of Data Science and Computing. Building on a platform developed and piloted at UCLA, called OneSciencePlace, iDLab is designed to support interactive, iterative research at the national scale. The platform enables researchers, educators and students to easily discover, access and use advanced computing and data resources through a single environment.

Specifically, Amit Majumdar (a co-principal investigator on the iDLab project and director of the Data Enabled Scientific Computing Division at SDSC); Choonhan Youn, Mark Zhuang (SDSC application programmers); and Christopher Irving (manager of the HPC Systems group at SDSC) will work with project partners on the development of iDLab.

iDLab will encompass web-based, user-friendly access to resources at SDSC, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the Rosen Center for Advanced Computing at Purdue University, the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, operated jointly by the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University, and the Texas Advanced Computing Center at the University of Texas at Austin, as well as two Cloud providers to be selected.

“Research progresses interactively. Ideas are formed and tested through rapid iteration on data. These workflows are becoming more data-intensive and more computationally demanding,” said Amit Chourasia, principal investigator of the iDLab project and chief research data architect in UCLA’s Office of Advanced Research Computing (OARC). “iDLab will serve as a front door, providing interactive access to the computing and research data capabilities of participating national computing centers.”

“The SDSC team is looking forward to being part of this exciting project, integrating SDSC HPC resources within the iDLab framework and working with the other partners,” added Majumdar.

iDLab’s shared storage will also allow researchers to share data without having to transfer it manually. It will also support publishing of scholarly content with persistent identifiers such as a Digital Object Identifier (DOI).

“Our vision is to make national research cyberinfrastructure function as a single, connected ecosystem. By integrating computing, research data and scientific applications, iDLab will enable researchers and educators to pursue discovery, collaborate more effectively, train the workforce, and adopt emerging technologies and infrastructure,” Chourasia said.

IDLab is supported by NSF (award no. 2609583). IDLab is part of the Integrated Data Systems and Services (IDSS) program, which also includes SDSC’s National Data Platform.