Networking, data experts design a better portal for scientific discovery

These days, it's easy to overlook the fact that the World Wide Web was created nearly 30 years ago primarily to help researchers access and share scientific data. Over the years, the web has evolved into a tool that helps us eat, shop, travel, watch movies and even monitor our homes.

Meanwhile, scientific instruments have become much more powerful, generating massive datasets, and international collaborations have proliferated In this new era, the web has become an essential part of the scientific process, but the most common method of sharing research data remains firmly attached to the earliest days of the web. This can be a huge impediment to scientific discovery.

That's why a team of networking experts from the Department of Energy's Energy Sciences Network (ESnet), with the Globus team from the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory, have designed a new approach that makes data sharing faster, more reliable and more secure. In an article published Jan. 15 in Peer J Comp Sci, the team describes their "The Modern Research Data Portal: a design pattern for networked, data-intensive science."

"Both the size of datasets and the quantity of data objects has exploded, but the typical design of a data portal hasn't really changed," said co-author Eli Dart, a network engineer with the Department of Energy's Energy Sciences Network, or ESnet. "Our new design preserves that ease of use, but easily scales up to handle the huge amounts of data associated with today's science."