NSDF All Hands Meeting — April 2023

The third National Science Data Fabric (NSDF) in-person meeting was held at the San Diego Supercomputer Center in La Jolla, California on April 12-13, 2023.

Keynote

Maria Elena Monzani, Stanford University

Data-Intensive search for Dark Matter with the LUX-ZEPLIN experiment

The nature and origin of dark matter are among the most compelling mysteries of contemporary science. This talk described the leading effort in that search, the LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) detector — 10 tons of liquified xenon gas maintained at almost atomic purity and stored in a refrigerated titanium cylinder a mile underground in a former gold mine in Lead, South Dakota. During its science run, LZ is projected to accumulate a massive dataset of many petabytes of data and record several billions of particle interactions, only a handful of which might be produced by potential dark matter candidates. Identifying the dark matter signals in this amassment of data represents an extreme “needle in a haystack” problem and requires leveraging advanced detector design and state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms.

Bio

Maria Elena Monzani is a dark matter data wrangler. Her research field is Astroparticle physics, which focuses on topics at the intersection between particle physics and astrophysics/cosmology, using the tools of data-intensive science. She received a dual Ph.D. from the University of Milano and the University of Paris 7, performing research with the Borexino experiment that measured neutrinos produced by the Sun. She then held a postdoctoral position at Columbia University before joining SLAC in 2007 to work on the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. Today, Monzani is a lead scientist at SLAC and a senior Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology member at Stanford. She leads the software computing effort for the LZ Dark Matter Experiment and the science operations team for the Fermi satellite. She is also an Adjunct Scholar at the Vatican Observatory.

Schedule

Wednesday, April 12

Session 1 — Welcome, Vision, and Keynote (Chair: Michela Taufer)

Affiliation	Speaker	Title	Slides
U Utah	Valerio Pascucci	The state of NSDF — DOI
UCSD	Frank Wuerthwein	Updates on NRP — DOI
Stanford U.	Maria Elena Monzani	Data-Intensive search for Dark Matter with the LUX-ZEPLIN experiment — DOI

Session 2 — Cloud, Storage, and Data Locality (Chair: Valerio Pascucci)

Affiliation	Speaker	Title	Slides
Alluxio	Shouwei Chen	How to Bring Data Locality to I/O-intensive Workloads on Cloud — DOI
U Utah	Aashish Panta	Testing Compressions with OpenVisus — DOI
SEAL Storage	Sal Malik	Web3 in the Real World: Decentralized Cloud Storage Use Cases — DOI
Alluxio	Bin Fan	Efficient Data Access and Migration Across Clouds — DOI
protocol.ai	Kenton Langstroth	Filecoin for researchers — DOI
UCSD	Karen Stocks	R2R Challenges managing large data from the US Academic Research Fleet — DOI

Session 3 — Regional CI, Data Fabrics, and Scientific Instruments (Chair: Ivan Rodero)

Affiliation	Speaker	Title	Slides
U Hawaii	Sean Cleveland	Needs for pacific regional CI — DOI
UCSD	Amarnath Gupta	A Data Fabric For Social Good? — DOI
LLNL	Peer-Timo Bremer	Distributed Data Access in the National Security Complex — DOI
U Chicago	Kyle Chard	Linking scientific instruments and computation: Patterns, technologies, and experiences — DOI
UCSD, OSG	Fabio Andrijauskas	Open Science Data Federation — DOI
NCSA	Luigi Marini	Clowder: Open Source, Customizable, Data and Workflow Management — DOI

Session 4 — Community Feedback, Authentication, Metadata, and Catalog (Chair: Christine Kirkpatrick)

Affiliation	Speaker	Title	Slides
U Utah	Attila Gyulassy	Community Feedback on Data Workflows — DOI
U Utah	Ivan Rodero	NSDF Authentication and Authorization Infrastructure — DOI
Sandia National Labs	Jay Lofstead	Metadata Management to Aid Data Discovery — DOI
U Utah	Giorgio Scorzelli	Updates on the NSDF OpenVisus — DOI
UTK	Heberth Martinez	Monitoring Latency and Throughput across Distributed Resources in NSDF — DOI
UTK	Jakob Luettgau	Updates on the NSDF Catalog — DOI

NSDF Dinner

Thursday, April 13

Session 5 — Research Security, FAIR, and Storage (Chair: Glenn Tarcea)

Affiliation	Speaker	Title	Slides
UCSD	Michael Corn	Framing Research Security and a discussion of risk identification — DOI
Utah State U.	Steve Petruzza	Portability of applications to heterogeneous systems and exascale systems — DOI
SDSC/UC San Diego	Christine Kirkpatrick	Tailoring the National Science Data Fabric to Open Science & FAIR Aims — DOI
Morgridge	Brian Bockelman	Kingfisher: Storage Management for Data Federations — DOI
Ronin Institute	Douglas Fils	Leveraging Structured Data on the Web to address FAIR Principles — DOI

Session 6 — Data Portals, Workflows, and Community Updates (Chair: Jakob Luettgau)

Affiliation	Speaker	Title	Slides
NVIDIA	Pavol Klacansky	Building a large scale community data portal with commodity hardware — DOI
U Utah	Owen Koppe	The NSDF-Data-Portal — DOI
UTK	Paula Olaya	Composing Scientific Workflows in the Cloud at Large Scale — DOI
U Michigan	Glenn Tarcea	Materials Commons Updates and Thinking Big By Thinking Small — DOI
Cornell, CHESS	Devin Bougie	The CHESS - NSDF Collaboration: Updates — DOI
Hawaii	Curt Dodds	Everything, Everywhere All at Once, All the Time - Challenges for Astronomy — DOI

Venue

The event was hosted at the San Diego Supercomputer Center on the UC San Diego campus in La Jolla, CA.

San Diego Supercomputer Center’s Auditorium E-B212 located on the ground floor of SDSC’s east entrance, just off the driveway on Hopkins Dr, close to the Hopkins Parking Structure, Northwest end of UC San Diego campus.

Google Maps

The San Diego International Airport (SAN) is the closest airport to UC San Diego and SDSC.

For driving directions see the SDSC visitor page

Lodging

The NSDF AHM did not have a dedicated room block. Several hotels near SDSC offer a university rate — ask for a “UCSD Rate” when contacting:

• Estancia La Jolla Hotel and Spa — 9700 N. Torrey Pines Road, La Jolla, CA 92037 — (858) 550-1000
• Sheraton La Jolla Hotel, Torrey Pines — 3299 Holiday Ct., La Jolla, CA 92037 — (858) 453-5500
• The Residence Inn — 8901 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, CA 92037 — (858) 587-1770

An extended list of hotels can be found on the SDSC Visitor page.

Transportation

Visitor parking permits are required to park on UC San Diego campus.

• Visiting UC faculty and staff who hold annual permits at their home campuses are eligible for up to 5 consecutive days of complimentary parking at UC San Diego. See reciprocity details.
• For non-UC visitors, purchase permits at a very reasonable rate — more details.
• The most convenient parking location is the Hopkins parking structure located on Hopkins Dr and Voigt Dr, just south of SDSC.
• Parking legally is the attendee’s responsibility. The penalty for an improperly parked car is at least $65 per day.

For cab or shuttle pick-up/drop-off: 10100 Hopkins Drive, La Jolla, CA 92093

Rideshare: Lyft or Uber — use “San Diego Supercomputer Center” as destination.

The San Diego International Airport (SAN) is the closest airport. Taxi services include Yellow Cab (619-444-4444), Orange Cab (619-223-5555), and Super Shuttle (800-974-8885).

Public Transportation surrounding UC San Diego