The LBNL Superfacility Project Report

TL;DR

The LBNL Superfacility project developed an integrated ecosystem of tools, infrastructure, and policies to enable large-scale, automated data analysis for experimental science across multiple national facilities.

Contribution

It introduced a comprehensive model for a connected scientific ecosystem supporting automation, real-time computing, and cross-disciplinary collaboration in high-performance environments.

Findings

Automated large-scale data analysis pipelines demonstrated

Production-level services established for remote facilities

Lessons provided for future large-scale scientific collaborations

Abstract

The Superfacility model is designed to leverage HPC for experimental science. It is more than simply a model of connected experiment, network, and HPC facilities; it encompasses the full ecosystem of infrastructure, software, tools, and expertise needed to make connected facilities easy to use. The three-year Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) Superfacility project was initiated in 2019 to coordinate work being performed at LBNL to support this model, and to provide a coherent and comprehensive set of science requirements to drive existing and new work. A key component of the project was the in-depth engagements with eight science teams that represent challenging use cases across the DOE Office of Science. By the close of the project, we met our project goal by enabling our science application engagements to demonstrate automated pipelines that analyze data from remote facilities at large scale, without routine human intervention. In several cases, we have gone beyond demonstrations and now provide production-level services. To achieve this goal, the Superfacility team developed tools, infrastructure, and policies for near-real-time computing support, dynamic high-performance networking, data management and movement tools, API-driven automation, HPC-scale notebooks via Jupyter, authentication using Federated Identity and container-based edge services supported. The lessons we learned during this project provide a valuable model for future large, complex, cross-disciplinary collaborations. There is a pressing need for a coherent computing infrastructure across national facilities, and LBNL's Superfacility project is a unique model for success in tackling the challenges that will be faced in hardware, software, policies, and services across multiple science domains.