The National Science Foundation has awarded $9 million to support iDLab — the Interactive Discovery Laboratory, a national effort led by the University of California, Los Angeles, in collaboration with NCSA, PSC, Purdue, SDSC, and TACC. iDLab will transition the OneSciencePlace (OSP) platform from pilot deployments to a national-scale, data-centric production service.

iDLab gives researchers, educators, and students browser-based access to computing, AI, and data across five ACCESS and NAIRR sites and two public cloud platforms. It provides a consistent catalog of interactive applications across all partner sites, dedicated GPU and CPU resources for interactive workloads, and a shared filesystem for near-real-time cross-site data access without manual data staging — supporting the full research data lifecycle from ingestion and interactive analysis through collaborative sharing and FAIR publication. iDLab complements and extends ACCESS and the National AI Research Resource (NAIRR) by providing the interactive layer for cross-facility access and rapid exploration.

The platform is already in use by Quakeworx, an open-access seismic research gateway integrating national ACCESS HPC systems, and is being deployed as the web portal to UCLA's Hoffman2 cluster. iDLab extends that work to a national-scale, NSF-funded production service spanning ACCESS and NAIRR sites and cloud platforms.

"Research progresses interactively. Ideas are formed and tested through rapid iteration on data. These workflows are becoming more data-intensive and more computationally demanding. iDLab will serve as a front door, providing interactive access to the computing and research data capabilities of participating national computing centers."

— Amit Chourasia, Principal Investigator, iDLab; Chief Research Data Architect, UCLA OARC

"Researchers should be able to focus on their science rather than on the complexity of the underlying technology. iDLab extends our mission to make advanced research computing more accessible by providing an intuitive environment that connects computing, data, and expertise across national computing centers."

— Davida Johnson, Executive Director, UCLA OARC

OneSciencePlace is developed by teams at UCLA, SDSC, and TACC, and builds on lessons from prior research cyberinfrastructure efforts including HUBzero, CIPRES, Apache Airavata, and Tapis.

About iDLab

iDLab is a unified, browser-based environment for interactive computing and data across NSF-supported research systems. Led by UCLA OARC and delivered in collaboration with NCSA, PSC, Purdue, SDSC, and TACC, iDLab is supported by the NSF Integrated Data Systems and Services (IDSS) program under award #2609583. Learn more at idlab.onescienceplace.org.

About OneSciencePlace

OneSciencePlace is a composable, managed platform for delivering science gateways, HPC portals, lab portals, education portals, and data publication environments through a low-code/no-code interface. It is developed by teams at UCLA, SDSC, and TACC. Learn more at onescienceplace.org.

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under award #2609583. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.