JSC Involved in Three New NFDI Consortia
The Joint Science Conference in Bonn (GWK) has announced that 10 National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI) consortia have been newly selected for funding in the second round of calls for proposals. The NFDI was established in 2020 to ensure that the large amount of data from publicly funded science is available to all scientists in Germany. Through the NFDI, the data holdings of science and research are to be systematically made accessible and sustainably secured while maintaining any need for protection as well as being networked on a national and international level. This is outlined in the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) principles. The NFDI is thus intended as a repository of knowledge for the entire research landscape and as a driver for Open Science. It is being funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research.
JSC is involved in three of the new consortia: PUNCH4NFDI (where Forschungszentrum Jülich acted as a co-applicant), FAIRmat, and Text+.
The consortium PUNCH4NFDI (Particles, Universe, NuClei, and Hadrons for the NFDI) will develop a new, common science platform for the areas of particle physics, astroparticle physics, astrophysics, and hadron and nuclear physics (https://www.punch4nfdi.de/). "Big Data" and "Open Data" already form part of the day-to-day routines of researchers in these areas. However, the new large-scale science facilities produce exponentially growing volumes of data that pose new challenges for the researchers. For example, the new Square Kilometre Array (SKA) telescope expects that data volume will surpass that of the entire internet as things stand. The PUNCH4NFDI platform will provide central access to the research data, offer modern tools for knowledge extraction, and allow the automatic publication of new research data. JSC will provide crucial support access to the research portal in the different research fields. For example, JSC hosts the German data archive of the international LOFAR telescope and will now develop new data storage concepts for SKA. As an HPC centre, JSC will offer optimized software tools, making data production, management, and analysis more efficient and, therefore, more and more climate compatible. Modern AI methods for analysing large quantities of complex data on supercomputers will play a significant role in achieving this goal. In addition, JSC will provide resources to the consortium such as computing time and storage space.
The FAIRmat consortium (https://www.fair-di.eu/fairmat) will create a data infrastructure in the field of condensed matter physics, the chemical physics of solids and materials science. JSC will provide support to this NFDI with infrastructure for prototype workflow implementations.
Furthermore, JSC is a participant in the Text+ consortium (https://www.text-plus.org/) and supports research on Digital Collections, Lexical Resources, and Editions with its expertise in operating and integrating data and compute services in the Text+ workspace concept.
Contact: jsc@fz-juelich.de
from JSC News No. 282, 27 July 2021