New Initiative Seeks to Standardize and Improve Computer Science Data Management

April 27, 2023 — Coordinated by the University of Duisburg-Essen (UDE), the National Research Data Infrastructure for and with Computer Science (NFDIxCS) project aims to develop sustainable services and infrastructure for storing, retrieving, and managing complex computer science data objects, as well as promoting the implementation of FAIR data principles.

NFDIxCS began on March 1, 2023 and is funding 17 project members for a period of five years. The main goal of the consortium is to identify, define, and, ultimately, deploy services to store complex domain-specific data objects from the particular variety of sub-domains from computer science (CS) and to comprehensively implement the FAIR principles. This includes producing reusable data objects specific to the various types of CS data, which not only contain these data along with the related metadata, but also the corresponding software, context, and execution information in a standardized format. These data objects can be of any size, structure, or quality.

Specifically, the project is addressing the following issues:

1. NFDIxCS will promote the implementation of the FAIR data principles for CS research data and software artifacts, simplify the citation of software and CS data, and thus modernize the publication processes and culture of both CS and its applications. NFDIxCS provides a forum for the discussion of CS research data formats, metadata formats and semantics. It will work towards generally accepted standards, in particular for the sustainable storage, retrieval and availability of CS research data.
2. NFDIxCS will, in collaboration with other scientific disciplines, support the application of CS methods such as Big Data, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. In addition, the operation of such systems generates large amounts of data, e.g. in the areas of high performance computing and computer architecture, which in turn will contribute to the further development of genuine CS methods.
3. NFDIxCS will share the experience and knowledge of the CS community on system architectures, processes, standards for interoperability, data-oriented scientific publication and communication systems with all interested scientific disciplines / consortia in the NFDI family.

The key aim of NFDIxCS is to assemble an organizational, technical, cooperative, and inter­operable infrastructure to bring together the relevant services and actors regarding CS. The services developed will be designed for sustainable operation. Among its objectives, NFDIxCS will promote the implementation of the FAIR data principles for CS research data and software artifacts, simplify the citation of software and CS data, and support the application of CS methods such as big data, artificial intelligence, and machine learning in other scientific disciplines. In addition, it will work towards generally accepted standards, in particular for the sustainable storage, retrieval, and availability of CS research data. The Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC) is contributing to the task areas HPC performance management and data for benchmarking.

About the Jülich Supercomputing Centre

The Jülich Supercomputing Centre (Forschungszentrum Jülich) has been operating the first German supercomputing center since 1987, and with the Jülich Institute for Advanced Simulation it is continuing the long tradition of scientific computing at Jülich. Computing time at the highest performance level is made available to researchers in Germany and Europe by means of an independent peer-review process. At the time being, JSC operates one of the most powerful supercomputers in Europe, JUWELS.

Source: JSC