DOE Funding $10M for Research on Data Reduction for Science

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April 15 — The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced $10 million for foundational research to address the challenges of managing and processing the increasingly massive data sets produced by today’s scientific instruments, facilities, and supercomputers in order to facilitate more efficient analysis.

The full text of the DOE Laboratories Funding Opportunity Announcement can be found on the funding opportunities page of the Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research within the DOE Office of Science.

As scientific user facilities are upgraded and expanded, data are produced at a rate beyond our capacity to store, analyze, stream, and archive. There is an urgent need to develop new techniques to shrink these data sets by removing trivial or repetitive data while preserving the important scientific information that can lead to discovery.

“Scientific user facilities across the nation, including those managed by the DOE Office of Science, are producing data that could lead to exciting and important scientific discoveries, but the size of that data is creating new challenges,” said Barb Helland, DOE Associate Director of Science for Advanced Scientific Computing Research. “Those discoveries can only be uncovered if the data is made manageable, and the techniques employed to do so are trusted by the scientists.”

A key challenge is to reduce data without losing important scientific information and to assure scientists that key information has been preserved. Research supported by this program will address both the efficiency and effectiveness of data reduction techniques and their inherent trustworthiness in preserving vital scientific information.

Improved management of data can be 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.

Applications will be open to universities, national laboratories, industry, and nonprofits, with awards selected competitively based on peer review. Total planned funding will be $10 million in Fiscal Year 2021 dollars for projects of three years in duration.