DOE National Collaboratories: Collaboratory for Multi-Scale Chemical Science

U.S. Department of Energy National Collaboratories

Collaboratory for Multi-Scale Chemical Science

A NC Base Program Project

The Collaboratory for Multi-Scale Chemical Science (CMCS) will use advanced collaboration and metadata-based data management technologies to develop an MCS (Multi-scale Chemical Sciences) portal providing community communications mechanisms and data search and annotation capabilities. This portal will also provide capabilities for defining and browsing cross-scale dependencies between data produced at one scale that is used as input for computations at the next.

Focusing on combustion research, the goal of the CMCS is to demonstrate that an integrated multi-scale approach to scientific and engineering research is not only possible but can produce significant benefits in harnessing research to address real-world issues. The field of combustion is critical to the DOE mission for clean and efficient energy, and the DOE has ongoing investments in research across the full range of relevant scales and disciplines. The CMCS will bring an integrated, informatics-based approach to combustion research that enhances and begins to automate the flow of information between sub-disciplines.

The objectives of this project are

Create an infrastructure enabling real-time and asynchronous collaborative development of standards for data and metadata description, inter-scale scientific communication, geographically distributed disciplinary collaboration, and project management
Modify tools to enable generation, storage, search and query of the required metadata in a format that allows interoperability with other tools and collaboratory functions, and make them available for use by geographically distributed collaborators
Provide repositories to store chemical sciences data and metadata in a way that preserves data integrity and allows web access.

This project is a collaboration among Sandia National Laboratories, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, National Institute of Standards and Technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of California, Berkeley.

For more info, see:

Project website: Collaboratory for Multi-Scale Chemical Science
2-Page Summary, March 2004 (PDF)
2-Page Summary, March 2003 (PDF)
4-Slide Presentation, March 2003 (PowerPoint Presentation)