The Materials Data Facility

The Materials Data Facility (MDF) acts an interconnection point that allows producers of materials data to dispatch their results broadly and data consumers to discover and aggregate data from independent sources. It streamlines and automates data sharing, discovery, access, and analysis by:

1. enabling data publication, regardless of data size, type, and location;
2. automating metadata extraction from submitted data into MDF metadata records using open-source materials-aware extraction pipelines and ingest pipelines;
3. unifying search across many materials data sources, including both MDF and other repositories with potentially different vocabularies and schemas.

Currently, MDF stores 40 TB of data from simulation and experiment, and also indexes hundreds of datasets contained in external repositories, with millions of individual MDF metadata records created from these datasets to aid fine-grained discovery.

The MDF is developing a serverless implementation of its data publication and discovery service using Globus Flows serviceS. This upgrde will allow us to improve the efficiency, decrease maintenance costs, and allow for scaling the MDF data publication concepts to other scientific domains.

Visit the Materials Data Facility

Publications

• Blaiszik, B., K. Chard, J. Pruyne, R. Ananthakrishnan, S. Tuecke, and I. Foster. “The Materials Data Facility: Data services to advance materials science research.” JOM 68, no. 8 (2016): 2045-2052.
• Blaiszik, Ben, Logan Ward, Marcus Schwarting, Jonathon Gaff, Ryan Chard, Daniel Pike, Kyle Chard, and Ian Foster. “A Data Ecosystem to Support Machine Learning in Materials Science.” MRS Communications (October 10, 2019): 1–9. doi:10.1557/mrc.2019.118.

Other Links

• Materials Data Facility - Home
• Materials Data Facility - Github
• Center for Hierarchical Materials Design ChiMaD

Support

CHiMaD Phase I

This work was performed under financial assistance award 70NANB14H012 from U.S. Department of Commerce, National Institute of Standards and Technology as part of the Center for Hierarchical Material Design (CHiMaD).

CHiMaD Phase II

This work was performed under the following financial assistance award 70NANB19H005 from U.S. Department of Commerce, National Institute of Standards and Technology as part of the Center for Hierarchical Materials Design (CHiMaD).

Contact

materialsdatafacility@uchicago.edu