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Published on October 14, 2024
DOE and SLAC Launch ILLUMINE Project to Streamline Big Data to Supercomputers for Real-Time AnalysisSource: Oak Ridge National Laboratory

The Department of Energy is pulling the strings together for a big leap in handling massive data floods from science experiments. According to a recent Oak Ridge National Laboratory announcement, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and a consortium of other DOE national labs are developing a new pipeline to speed big data from experiments to the nation's supercomputing hubs. The main idea is simple: Let sophisticated machines rapidly crunch numbers so scientists can fine-tune their studies on the fly.

The ILLUMINE project initiative seeks to eliminate the bottleneck currently posed by excessive data generation, which surpasses what even the most advanced research facilities can self-process. SLAC's Jana Thayer told the lab's news service that an essential part of the problem is that these facilities produce terabytes per second, way more than what's currently manageable.

The DOE's heavy hitters, like the Frontier and Aurora supercomputers, play a crucial part in this grand scheme. These computing behemoths can perform over a quintillion calculations each second, precisely the muscle needed to tackle the immense data sets. This firepower aims to sidestep the traditional need to save data mid-experiment and analyze it in real time instead. Jana Thayer highlighted in a statement obtained by the lab that this would not only speed up the scientific process but also sharpen its accuracy.

One year into the ILLUMINE project, the team has crossed substantial milestones. An initial success involved zapping datasets from SLAC's California-based Coherent X-ray Imaging beamline to Oak Ridge's Summit supercomputer. This brought light to the potential of harnessing such networks for future scientific endeavors, as shared in an interview with the lab's officials.