Key takeaways
UCLA has been selected by the National Science Foundation to lead the Interactive Discovery Laboratory (iDLab), a three-year national initiative to create a unified environment for research computing, data and scientific applications across several NSF-supported national computing centers and two cloud platforms. The effort is supported by a $9 million award.
The project will create a browser-based interface that makes accessing and using high-powered computing, data storage and applications as easy as visiting a webpage. The new platform, called the Interactive Discovery Laboratory (iDLab), will replace the current procedure that requires command-line interface expertise. It will allow researchers, educators and students to access advanced computing and data across several universities.
“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.”
UCLA’s Office of Advanced Research Computing partners with researchers across virtually every academic discipline, providing advanced computing, research data services, scientific software and expert consultation. OARC staff have doctoral degrees in many fields, including statistics, physics and digital humanities, as well as deep computational expertise. They offer training and assistance to professors, graduate students and postdocs, undergraduates and staff — anyone at UCLA who is doing digital research or scholarship. OARC also supports teaching that requires students to use computing resources.
Building on a platform developed and piloted at UCLA, called OneSciencePlace, iDLab is designed to support interactive, iterative research at the national scale, enabling researchers, educators and students to discover, access and use advanced computing and data resources through a single environment.
“Researchers should be able to focus on their science rather than on the complexity of the underlying technology,” Davida Johnson, executive director of OARC, said. “IDLab extends our mission to make advanced research computing more accessible by providing an intuitive environment that connects computing, data, and expertise across national computing centers.”
IDLab will integrate resources across five universities: the San Diego Supercomputer Center at UC San Diego Halıcıoğlu School of Data Science and Computing, 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, and two Cloud providers to be selected. IDLab will enable researchers across the country to access and use the advanced computing resources at these NSF computing sites and the cloud.
“Modern scientific discovery is amplified by partnerships that connect researchers with advanced computing, data and expertise. IDLab embodies that approach, bringing together national computing centers in a shared environment that broadens access to these research capabilities and accelerates discovery across disciplines,” said Roger Wakimoto, UCLA vice chancellor for research.
In addition to making resources easier to access and use, iDLab’s shared storage will 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.