April 15, 2022 — Today, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced $26 million for research to advance scientific data management and visualization. Foundational research in data management will address challenges stemming from the increasingly massive data sets produced by scientific experiments and supercomputers. Innovative and intuitive data visualization approaches will support scientific discovery, decision-making, and communication based on that data.
Applications are open to universities, national laboratories, industry, and nonprofits, with awards of up to three years selected competitively based on peer review. The Funding Opportunity Announcements, “Management and Storage of Scientific Data” and “Data Visualization for Scientific Discovery, Decision-Making, and Communication” sponsored by the Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research within the Department’s Office of Science, can be found here.
$13 million of the $26 million will support research to optimize the management of massive amounts of data that must be moved and reproducibly analyzed using sophisticated mathematical techniques, including machine learning, in systems that provide both speed and flexibility. Supported research will also advance innovative techniques that exploit smart storage and networking hardware that may provide breakthroughs that address the data challenges scientists and engineers face. Improvements in data management are expected to facilitate discovery in a wide range of fields, from materials science and chemistry to climate modeling and the development of new clean energy sources and new approaches to increasing energy efficiency and reducing energy consumption.
The other $13 million will support research in new techniques and theory needed to aid in the development of informative and interactive visualization of complex scientific data of interest to DOE’s mission space—from those describing astrophysical and Earth systems to those describing advanced manufacturing processes and quantum systems. The development and deployment of visualization tools that incorporate human centric and interoperable design for scientific computing and simulations is key to avoiding bespoke solutions that limit the engagement of a broader range of domain scientists. Supported advances will address the rapid expansion of data generation and availability, the complexity of data types, new visualization technologies becoming available on the edge, as well as the demand for decisions to be made at the edge. Advances in visualization techniques will better enable inter-disciplinary collaboration and enhance communication across domains, educational backgrounds, and cultures. In addition, efforts will explore how visualization can best utilize new technologies such as virtual reality, augmented reality, and haptics, as well as take advantage of DOE’s computational hardware.
“Making the most of the deluge of data generated by modern scientific experiments and simulations to predict and analyze experimental observations requires new capabilities in data management and visualization,” said Barbara Helland, DOE Associate Director of Science for Advanced Scientific Computing Research. “Not only must the data be processed and stored at high rates across the edge, cloud, and high-performance computing environments, but we also need to develop new visualization methods to explore that data, form hypotheses, and convey conclusions to a broad spectrum of audiences.”
