Creating an integrated collaborative environment for materials research
Matthew D. Jacobsen, James R. Fourman, Kevin M. Porter, Elizabeth A. Wirrig, Mark D. Benedict, Bryon J. Foster, Charles H. Ward · Integrating materials and manufacturing innovation · 2016
This paper describes the creation of a cyberinfrastructure to facilitate collaborative materials research in a laboratory environment that supports the discovery, development, and sustainment of materials and processing solutions. The infrastructure provides a web-based interface supporting group and project spaces within which researchers can easily organize, share, and collaborate on the results of their experimental and computational efforts. It seamlessly connects researchers with experimental and computational resources for easy generation, collection, and storage of digital data to provide instant access to results with no intermediate transfers. Persistent identifiers and metadata tagging are used to ensure historical research data are discoverable, interpretable, and reusable. The architecture is designed to be modular and agile and is based on federation of both applications and data through a central service bus that brokers all transactions. It is comprised of a number of open-source, commercial, and non-commercial software packages that provide the specific functionality needed to meet the large number of system requirements. This collaborative environment is essential to enabling a large research organization to conduct a research program consistent with the discipline of Integrated Computational Materials Engineering by allowing the seamless connection of experiment to model through pedigreed digital data with complete provenance.