Director of Interconnected Science Ecosystem ORNL, Tennessee, United States
Scientific research today often requires manual and labor-intensive processes that limit the pace of new discoveries. The Interconnected Science Ecosystem (INTERSECT) initiative at Oak Ridge National Laboratories (ORNL) is actively building interconnected smart laboratories of the future. The primary goal is to build and deploy a common yet flexible system-of-systems architecture to bridge diverse capabilities and scientific domains at ORNL that range from advanced material synthesis and characterization to advanced manufacturing to modeling and simulation running on high performance computing. Coordination across diverse scientific modes and computational methods into a unified workflow is a challenging problem, which motivates the INTERSECT initiative. During this presentation, we outline how the INTERSECT architecture is being utilized as a framework for integrating computational resources and scientific instruments, addressing challenges in developing reusable microservices, data staging and collection, control mechanisms, resource authorization and governance, and hardware integration. This work provides a blueprint for federating multi-institutional, disparate resources and orchestrating scientific work to enable next-generation smart laboratories of the future.
