ZIB/BUA Data Storage 4 NFDI (NFDI-Storage 2025)

• Term: Funded in 2026
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 579751906

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. 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. Berlin’s leading research institutions, the partner institutions of the Berlin University Alliance, FUB, HUB, TUB, and Charité, have prepared a joint proposal that reflects a coordinated initiative of the Berlin research landscape. The proposal aims to install federated, high-performance physical storage infrastructure and an integrated data transformation layer to support the requirements of NFDI consortia, to be hosted at the environment of the Berlin NHR Center located at ZIB, a key competence center for scientific computing and data infrastructures. We plan to expand our existing research data storage infrastructure by a tiered approach. This is consistent with the infrastructure already in place and in use at ZIB. These tiers are “hot” for latency-critical analysis and interactive workflows, “warm” for scalable throughput and collaborative curation, and “cold” for durable, low-cost storage. By expanding our existing platform, these services and connected data management and distribution processes become immediately available to all NFDI consortia and directly allow storage and sharing of high data volumes. To make the storage available to different software stacks and to accommodate specific demands, there will a tight integration with the NHR system, the local tier-3 HPC systems and analytics services. Since most consortia ask for a significant portion of “cold” data, we plan to add Tape Storage with replication and automated data lifecycle policies. The platform will integrate seamless with ZIB and NHR HPC systems, be coordinated and coherently operated jointly with other NHR centers and provide FAIR-aligned metadata and policy-driven data movement.

• DFG Programme: Major Research Instrumentation
• Major Instrumentation: ZIB/BUA Data Storage 4 NFDI (NFDI-Speicher 2025)
• Instrumentation Group: 7000 Datenverarbeitungsanlagen, zentrale Rechenanlagen
• Applicant Institution: Freie Universität Berlin
• Leader: Professor Dr. Christof Schütte