DOE's Large-Scale Experimental Facilities and Powerful Computing Resources: Enabling Breakthrough Discoveries

Friday - February 23 2024, 00:33 UTC - 9 months ago

The recent upgrade at the Advanced Photon Source (APS) is expected to generate an overwhelming amount of data, highlighting the need for advanced computing and data storage capabilities. Argonne's Nexus effort aims to integrate experimental facilities with powerful computing resources and has already collaborated with other facilities such as CERN's Large Hadron Collider. Overall, this integration is crucial in enabling breakthrough discoveries from the ever-increasing influx of scientific data.

The ever-increasing influx of scientific data has become a challenge for researchers around the world. With advancements in technology, experiments at major facilities, such as the Advanced Photon Source (APS) at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory, are producing an overwhelming amount of data. The recent upgrade at the APS, set to be completed this year, is expected to generate 100-200 petabytes of data per year.

This increase is substantial compared to the five petabytes previously produced annually at the APS before the upgrade. When combined with the data generated at DOE's four other light sources, the facilities are projected to produce 1 exabyte of data per year in the next decade. To put this into perspective, this amount of data is equivalent to streaming 1.5 million movies every day for a year.

To efficiently handle this massive amount of data, Argonne has been investing in advanced computing and data storage capabilities. Nicholas Schwarz, a computer scientist and lead for scientific software and data management at the APS, explains, "We need to do a lot more than simply move a lot of data around. For the X-ray experiments carried out at the APS, we need to use advanced computational tools to look at every pixel of every frame, analyze the data in near real time, and use the results to make decisions about the next experiment." .

With the growing deluge of scientific data, it is crucial for the scientific community to have the resources and capabilities to process, analyze, store and share the data in order to gain insights and make new discoveries. Michael E. Papka, Argonne deputy associate laboratory director for Computing, Environment and Life Sciences, emphasizes this, saying, "The scientific community's ability to process, analyze, store and share these massive datasets is critical to gaining insights that will spark new discoveries." .

Argonne's Nexus effort is a key part of DOE's vision to build an integrated research infrastructure (IRI). This project aims to seamlessly integrate the cutting-edge experimental facilities with the world-class supercomputing, artificial intelligence, and data resources available at Argonne. For over a decade, the lab has been working on developing tools and methods to connect its powerful computing resources with large-scale experiments. This includes collaborations with other facilities such as the DIII-D National Fusion Facility and CERN's Large Hadron Collider.

Overall, the integration of DOE's large-scale experimental facilities and powerful computing resources is crucial in keeping up with the rapid production of scientific data and enabling breakthrough discoveries.