BD Spokes: SPOKE: MIDWEST: Collaborative: Integrative Materials Design (IMaD): Leverage, Innovate, and Disseminate

Northwestern University, Evanston IL

Investigators

Abstract

Materials innovation is a pipeline, deriving from a deep understanding and control of material behavior and properties, leading to advanced materials designs that advance economic prosperity, address national and regional energy needs, and bolster national security. Improving this pipeline requires connecting independent but thematically congruent national and regional materials design efforts to align key stakeholders, consolidate diverse materials data expertise, simplify data access, coalesce on topics of data description and interoperability, enhance and ensure the quality of datasets, and deploy scalable data services to support materials researchers. The Midwest Big Data Spoke (MBD Spoke) for Integrative Materials Design (IMaD) connects researchers in industry, universities, and government to the people and services needed to easily find, access, and use data, tools, and services for materials design. The Midwest is the ideal place for such a program. Many major national materials design efforts funded by DOE, NIST, and NSF as part of the Materials Genome Initiative (MGI) operate in the Midwest, and the Midwest is home to major manufacturing industries that depend critically on materials innovation for their continued competitiveness. The technical work of IMaD will involve integration of software and services from across the Midwest and beyond, including the Materials Commons, the Materials Data Facility, NIST Materials Resource Registry, and Citrine Informatics, to enable smooth flow of software and data among these different systems. For example, integrated authentication provided by Globus Auth will enable access to different components with common credentials (e.g., institutional credentials), and integration of Globus transfer will allow for rapid and reliable exchange of large datasets. Common schemas and metadata terms will be developed and deployed to permit cross-system searching and display of information. Materials data from partners across the Midwest and beyond will be loaded into the Material Data Facility to permit easy discovery and access. Concurrently with these and other development activities, a series of workshops and meetings will be convened to engage academic, government, and industry participants in defining requirements for, and making use of, the integrated system for materials design. This award received co-funding from the Math and Physical Sciences Directorate (MPS) Division of Materials Research (DMR).