The federal government has tapped Newport News-based Jefferson Lab to lead a sweeping new national data science project.
The U.S. Department of Energy, which oversees Jefferson Lab and 16 other national laboratories, made the announcement Monday.
The High Performance Data Facility Hub, led by Jefferson Lab in partnership with California’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, will include building new infrastructure for data-intensive science.
That would help streamline research across the country in line with the energy department’s “integrated science” goals.
Linking resources that are currently distributed around the country “is becoming paramount to modern collaborative science,” the department says.
“The challenges of our time call upon DOE and its national laboratories to be an open innovation ecosystem,” officials wrote in a presentation this summer.
In a statement Monday, DOE official Geraldine Richmond added that high quality research data “is the rocket fuel of the AI era and all other forms of emerging technologies.”
Major scientific facilities generate vast amounts of data while doing research, including through supercomputer simulations and artificial intelligence tools.
Jefferson Lab said its mission with the new hub will be to accelerate the pace of scientific discovery by allowing researchers to access those large amounts of data in a massive central computing platform, even in real time.
Officials said they plan to partner with local universities as the project develops.
The Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility, as it’s formally known, specializes in nuclear physics research. In 2018 the lab completed a nearly $340 million overhaul to its massive particle accelerator, which allows scientists to probe deeper into the basic building blocks of matter.
DOE is giving the data project at least $300 million, with the possibility of up to half a billion dollars. The state of Virginia has also committed to providing $43 million to fund the construction of a new data center building.
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