TUDa Data Storage (NFDI-Storage 2025)

• Term: since 2026
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 579750574

This proposal is part of a set coordinated by the National High Performance Computing (NHR) centers. This collaborative effort is rooted in the NHR's established expertise in providing nationwide, cross-university services and managing large-scale research infrastructures. We aim to support NFDI with an integrated and reliable storage landscape that, similar to the existing NHR services, will be operated sustainably and can thus mark the beginning of the development of a coherent research data infrastructure in Germany. The NHR centers collectively propose to build a nationally orchestrated data backbone encompassing both physical storage resources, and a layer for transforming data for research data services directly targeting the NFDI consortia. The storage resources will be closely interlinked with existing HPC systems to allow more data-intensive processing, e.g., as required for AI training and applications. The infrastructure will be consistently supported by identity and access management, distribution, and provisioning processes that were developed together with NFDI consortia and will meet the guidelines for the EOSC Federation. This coordinated approach leverages the diverse technological strengths across individual NHR sites to meet the data storage requirements expressed by the NFDI consortia. Based on the requirements of the NFDI consortia NFDI4ING, NFDI-MatWerk, and NFDIxCS, we plan an object storage system providing 11 petabytes of warm storage to the consortia. It will allow the direct storage and sharing of high data volumes. The storage system will serve as a backend for research data management platforms and services of the consortia to meet their consortia-specific demands. The storage will also be directly linked to our HPC hot storage, enabling convenient computation on the research data using our HPC infrastructure. An additional tape storage for system-independent backup and disaster recovery will accompany the object storage. In close cooperation with RWTH Aachen, our object storage will serve as a storage backend for the data management platform Coscine. Coscine allows data management according to the FAIR principles and metadata management using knowledge graphs. It is already endorsed by several NFDI consortia, in particular NFDI4ING and NFDI-MatWerk, which we directly support with the storage system. By expanding this existing platform, these services, connected data management and distribution processes become immediately available to all NFDI consortia. Furthermore, the NFDI consortia can directly access the storage system via the flexible S3 interface as required by NFDIxCS. additionally we plan to connect TUdatalib, the institutional repository for research data at TU Darmstadt.

• DFG Programme: Major Research Instrumentation
• Major Instrumentation: TUDa Data Storage (NFDI-Speicher 2025)
• Instrumentation Group: 7000 Datenverarbeitungsanlagen, zentrale Rechenanlagen
• Applicant Institution: Technische Universität Darmstadt
• Leader: Dr.-Ing. Johannes Braun