NFDI Data Storage in Saxony (NFDI-Storage 2025)

• Term: since 2026
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 579751442

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 high performance computing systems to allow data-intensive processing. The infrastructure will be consistently supported by identity and access management, distribution, and provisioning processes. This coordinated approach leverages the diverse technological strengths across individual NHR sites to meet the data storage requirements expressed by the NFDI consortia. The Center for Information Services and High Performance Computing (ZIH) at TU Dresden proposes to provide data storage for six NFDI consortia: GHGA (German Human Genome-Phenome Archive), NFDI4Chem (Chemistry), NFDI4Culture (Material and Immaterial Cultural Heritage), NFDI4DataScience (Data Science and Artificial Intelligence), NFDI4Earth (Earth System Sciences), and PUNCH4NFDI (Particles, Universe, Nuclei and Hadrons). These storages will enable the fulfillment of the scientific mission of the NFDI consortia: online repositories for sharing of research data along the FAIR principles and standards developed in the NFDI, fostering the reusability of research data by close connection to large-scale data processing systems (high-performance computing and machine learning infrastructures at ZIH), and resilient long-term archiving of research data. We plan to extend our existing object storage systems and tape library systems and deploy more than 20 PB of usable capacity for the NFDI. Both storage types will be installed in 2026 in a geo replicated setup, providing highest data availability. With a hierarchical storage management system, automatic storage tiering for efficient and demand-driven use of the storage capacities will be enabled. The expertise of the established structures at the Center for Interdisciplinary Digital Sciences of TU Dresden, including ScaDS.AI Dresden/Leipzig (Center for Scalable Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence), the national Data Competence Center Come2Data, the Service Center Research Data, and the Data Trustee Center will provide additional support for research data management and data analytics.

• DFG Programme: Major Research Instrumentation
• Major Instrumentation: NFDI-Datenspeicher in Sachsen (NFDI-Speicher 2025)
• Instrumentation Group: 7000 Datenverarbeitungsanlagen, zentrale Rechenanlagen
• Applicant Institution: Technische Universität Dresden
• Leader: Professor Dr. Wolfgang E. Nagel