description
A talk given at a workshop in Atlanta on "Building an Integrated MGI Accelerator Network": see http://acceleratornetwork.org/event/building-an-integrated-mgi-accelerator-network/. The US Materials Genome Initiative seeks to develop an infrastructure that will accelerate advanced materials development and deployment. The term Materials Genome suggests a science that is fundamentally driven by the systematic capture of large quantities of elemental data. In practice, we know, things are more complex—in materials as in biology. Nevertheless, the ability to locate and reuse data is often essential to research progress. I discuss here three aspects of networking materials data: data publication and discovery; linking instruments, computations, and people to enable new research modalities based on near-real-time processing; and organizing data generation, transformation, and analysis software to facilitate understanding and reuse. I use these three problems to motivate a discussion of recent results in cloud computing, data publication management, high-performance computing, and related topics.