Purdue enables AI- and data- cyberinfrastructure, partners in multiple newly awarded NSF projects

Purdue’s Rosen Center for Advanced Computing (RCAC) has recently secured funding as a partner on multiple National Science Foundation (NSF) grants. The grants come from the Integrated Data Systems and Services (IDSS) program, and RCAC is a partner on three of the awards in this first cycle, with a total intended award amount exceeding $42 million. With these awards, RCAC will help develop and deploy cyberinfrastructure systems that enable data-intensive and artificial intelligence (AI)-driven research nationwide.

Created under the NSF’s Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure (OAC), the IDSS program aims to provide support for foundational, national-scale data cyberinfrastructure that facilitates AI- and data-driven science and engineering research and education. IDSS is a broad-spectrum initiative focusing on transdisciplinary and multidisciplinary projects. Projects are divided into three categories: 1) development, deployment, and operation of new systems; 2) enhancement of smaller systems to national scale; 3) planning grants for future potential development. The three projects that RCAC is involved with are in categories 1 and 2:

• Category I: Fabric for AI-Driven Science (FabAID): A $24.5M project led by the Morgridge Institute for Research, the FabAID project will support the life cycle of scientific datasets by integrating data repositories with national-scale computing resources. Researchers will be able to utilize FabAID to seamlessly manage the data-intensive workflows required to conduct AI-driven research. Purdue will integrate archival storage capability into FabAID via the Fortress archive. More information about the project can be found here: Fabric for AI-Driven Science

• Category II: Transitioning the National Science Data Fabric (NSDF) Pilot into a National Operational Cyberinfrastructure and Service for Democratized, AI-Driven Scientific Discovery: This project is led by the University of Tennessee Knoxville (UTK) and will scale the successful NSDF Pilot program into a full production-grade national cyberinfrastructure and service. NSDF solves the problem of data isolation. It connects researchers at institutions of all sizes to scientific data wherever it resides—whether it be at national laboratories, experimental facilities, cloud platforms, or campus clusters—while eliminating data movement issues. Once online, researchers at institutions with limited computing resources will still be able to contribute to scientific progress in domains that rely on large volumes of data. Purdue will lead the integration of Entry Points and coordinate the national operation of NSDF. Purdue will also dedicate Anvil object storage and computational resources, as well as host an NSDF Entry Point infrastructure to support the execution of NSDF data-driven workflows on these resources. The NSDF project was awarded $9M, and more information can be found here: National Science Data Fabric

• Category II: iDLab - A Federated Interactive Discovery Lab for Data-Driven Research and Education: The final project that RCAC is partnered on from this round of IDSS awards is the Interactive Discovery Laboratory (iDLab), led by the University of California, Los Angeles. The iDLab project will transition the OneSciencePlace platform from a pilot to a national-scale, data-centric production service that connects five NSF-supported high-performance computing (HPC) resources and two public cloud platforms. Researchers will have access to local data resources, interactive applications, and a shared data partition, all through an easy-to-use web-based platform. Purdue will integrate its Anvil cluster into the iDLab ecosystem, providing new pathways to HPC cluster access and accelerating interactive data-driven scientific discovery. The iDLab project was awarded $9M in funding. More information can be found here: Interactive Discovery Laboratory

“Professor Michela Taufer at UTK and I first began discussing the IDSS Category II idea in September 2025, and it’s exciting to see that idea reach this milestone,” says Carol Song, Chief Scientist at RCAC and co-Principal Investigator on one of the IDSS projects. “This NSDF IDSS project is a true collaboration, and we’re proud to be part of it. Purdue’s RCAC brings the capacity, operational strength, and technical innovation needed to support researchers and students at scale, and we’re especially excited to contribute to this new NSF data program from the beginning. Seeing RCAC’s role across multiple awards in this round highlights the depth of expertise we have here and the momentum of our growing partnerships with other U.S. institutions.”

A major component of the IDSS program is integration; projects are expected to leverage and interconnect with existing national-scale cyberinfrastructure systems and services, such as those provided through the NSF’s ACCESS and NAIRR programs. Purdue’s Anvil supercomputer serves researchers nationwide through both of these programs. Thanks to Anvil, Purdue was able to capitalize on these new funding opportunities.

“Being a partner on three of the initial round of IDSS awards highlights the importance of having national resources at Purdue and the connective role that it serves,” says Preston Smith, Executive Director of RCAC. “Advanced computing and the expertise delivering it is the bridge between researchers and the broader national ecosystem.”

To learn more about the IDSS program, please visit: Integrated Data Systems and Services. Project solicitations are currently open, with a proposal deadline of July 27th, 2027.

The Rosen Center for Advanced Computing (RCAC) operates the centrally-maintained research computing resources at Purdue University, providing access to leading-edge computational and data storage systems as well as expertise and support to Purdue faculty, staff, and student researchers. If you have an idea or project proposal that you’d like to discuss with RCAC, please reach out to: rcac-help@purdue.edu

Anvil is one of Purdue University’s most powerful supercomputers, providing researchers from diverse backgrounds with advanced computing capabilities. Built through a $10 million system acquisition grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), Anvil supports scientific discovery by providing resources through the NSF’s Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Coordination Ecosystem: Services & Support (ACCESS), a program that serves tens of thousands of researchers across the United States. Anvil also supports advanced artificial intelligence research as an official resource provider of the National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource (NAIRR) Pilot.

Researchers may request access to Anvil via the ACCESS allocations process or through the NAIRR allocations process. More information about Anvil is available on Purdue’s Anvil website. Anyone with questions should contact anvil@purdue.edu. Anvil is funded under NSF award No. 2005632.

Written by: Jonathan Poole, poole43@purdue.edu