Congratulations to Dr. Xin Liang from the UK Computer Science Department, a recipient of the prestigious NSF CAREER Award. The funded project is concerned with the concept of data polymorphism and aims to enable fast and adaptable scientific data retrieval. Scientific simulations and instruments produce an unprecedented amount of data that overwhelms the network and storage systems. Due to the limited capacity in high-end parallel file systems, such data must be stored at remote sites or moved to secondary storage for archival purposes. This poses challenges to fetching the data for post hoc data analytics, as the data movement bandwidth across wide area networks or from secondary systems is very limited.
This project bridges this gap by developing scalable software to realize data polymorphism, a novel paradigm that allows for variable representations of the same data under different scenarios and use cases to enable on-demand data provision with reduced data movement cost. The success of this project is expected to significantly reduce the time needed to gain scientific insights from data for a wide range of applications, thus advancing scientific discoveries in domains including climatology, cosmology, fusion energy science, and ptychography. This contributes to resolving a wide range of important societal problems, including weather forecasting, galaxy surveys, electric generation, and material design. Furthermore, an integrated education program is developed for workforce development and broadening participation in advanced cyberinfrastructure.