2021-24: An Open Federated Architecture for the Laboratory of the Future

This project is part of the Interconnected Science Ecosystem (INTERSECT) Initiative at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. It creates an open federated hardware/software architecture for the research laboratory of the future using a novel system-of-systems (SoS) and microservice architecture approach, connecting scientific instruments, robot-controlled laboratories and edge/center computing/data resources to enable autonomous experiments, self-driving laboratories, smart manufacturing, and artificial intelligence (AI) driven design, discovery and evaluation.

Figure 1: The INTERSECT Interconnected Science Ecosystem (INTERSECT) Initiative at Oak Ridge National Laboratory enables autonomous experiments, self-driving laboratories, smart manufacturing, and AI-driven design, discovery and evaluation

This effort employs science use cases as design patterns that identify and abstract the involved hardware/software components and their interactions in terms of control, work and data flow. It creates a SoS architecture of the federated hardware/software ecosystem that clarifies terms, architectural elements, the interactions between them and compliance. It further designs a federated microservice architecture, mapping science use case design patterns to the SoS architecture with loosely coupled microservices and uniform interfaces.

Figure 2: The components of the INTERSECT architecture in the context of the federated ecosystem for interconnected smart laboratories

The primary deliverable of this project is an INTERSECT open architecture specification, containing the use case design pattern catalog, the federated SoS architecture specification, and the federated microservice architecture documentation.

Latest INTERSECT architecture documentation: intersect-architecture.readthedocs.io

Prominent Solutions

• The INTERSECT Federated Architecture for the Laboratory of the Future

Funding Sources

• Interconnected Science Ecosystem (INTERSECT) Initiative, Laboratory Directed Research and Development, Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Participants

• Christian Engelmann (PI), Michael Brim, Swen Boehm, Olga Kuchar, Jack Lange, Thomas Naughton, Patrick Widener, Ben Mintz, Rob Moore, Elke Arenholz, Scott Atchley, Suhas Somnath, and Rohit Srivastava — Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Peer-reviewed Conference Publications

1. Christian Engelmann and Suhas Somnath. Science Use Case Design Patterns for Autonomous Experiments. In Proceedings of the 28th European Conference on Pattern Languages of Programs (EuroPLoP) 2023, pages 1-14, Kloster Irsee, Germany, July 5-9, 2023. ACM Press, New York, NY, USA. ISBN 979-8-4007-0040-8. DOI 10.1145/3628034.3628060.
2. Christian Engelmann, Olga Kuchar, Swen Boehm, Michael J. Brim, Thomas Naughton, Suhas Somnath, Scott Atchley, Jack Lange, Ben Mintz, and Elke Arenholz. The INTERSECT Open Federated Architecture for the Laboratory of the Future. In Communications in Computer and Information Science (CCIS): Accelerating Science and Engineering Discoveries Through Integrated Research Infrastructure for Experiment, Big Data, Modeling and Simulation. 18th Smoky Mountains Computational Sciences & Engineering Conference (SMC) 2022, pages 173-190, August 24-25, 2022. Springer, Cham. ISBN 978-3-031-23605-1. DOI 10.1007/978-3-031-23606-8_11. Acceptance rate 32.4% (24/74).

Peer-reviewed Workshop Publications

1. Michael J. Brim, Lance Drane, Marshall McDonnell, Christian Engelmann, and Addi Malviya Thakur. A Microservices Architecture Toolkit for Interconnected Science Ecosystems. In Proceedings of the 37th International Conference on High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC) Workshops 2024: 19th Workshop on Workflows in Support of Large-Scale Science (WORKS) 2024, Atlanta, GA, USA, November 18, 2024. IEEE Computer Society, Los Alamitos, CA, USA. To appear.

Peer-reviewed Conference Posters

1. Christian Engelmann, Swen Boehm, Michael Brim, Jack Lange, Thomas Naughton, Patrick Widener, Ben Mintz, and Rohit Srivastava. INTERSECT: The Open Federated Architecture for the Laboratory of the Future. Poster at the 52nd International Conference on Parallel Processing (ICPP) 2023, Salt Lake City, UT, USA, August 7-10, 2023.

White Papers

1. Ryan Adamson and Christian Engelmann. Cybersecurity and Privacy for Instrument-to-Edge-to-Center Scientific Computing Ecosystems. White paper accepted at the U.S. Department of Energy's ASCR Workshop on Cybersecurity and Privacy for Scientific Computing Ecosystems, November 3-5, 2021.
2. Hal Finkel, Pete Beckman, Christian Engelmann, Shantenu Jha, and Jack Lange. Research Opportunities in Operating Systems for Scientific Edge Computing. White paper by the U.S. Department of Energy's ASCR Roundtable Discussions on Operating-Systems Research 2021, January 25, 2021.
3. Hal Finkel, Pete Beckman, Ron Brightwell, Rudi Eigenmann, Christian Engelmann, Roberto Gioiosa, Kamil Iskra, Shantenu Jha, Jack Lange, Tapasya Patki, and Kevin Pedretti. Research Opportunities in Operating Systems for High-Performance Scientific Computing. White paper by the U.S. Department of Energy's ASCR Roundtable Discussions on Operating-Systems Research 2021, January 25, 2021.

Technical Reports

1. Michael Brim and Christian Engelmann. INTERSECT Architecture Specification: Microservice Architecture (Version 0.9). Technical Report, ORNL/TM-2023/3171, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN, USA, September 1, 2023. DOI 10.2172/2333815.
2. Christian Engelmann and Suhas Somnath. INTERSECT Architecture Specification: Use Case Design Patterns (Version 0.9). Technical Report, ORNL/TM-2023/3133, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN, USA, September 1, 2023. DOI 10.2172/2229218.
3. Olga A. Kuchar, Swen Boehm, Thomas Naughton, Suhas Somnath, Ben Mintz, Jack Lange, Scott Atchley, Rohit Srivastava, and Patrick Widener. INTERSECT Architecture Specification: System-of-systems Architecture (Version 0.9). Technical Report, ORNL/TM-2023/3168, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN, USA, September 1, 2023. DOI 10.2172/2333813.
4. Michael Brim and Christian Engelmann. INTERSECT Architecture Specification: Microservice Architecture (Version 0.5). Technical Report, ORNL/TM-2022/2715, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN, USA, September 1, 2022. DOI 10.2172/1902805.
5. Christian Engelmann and Suhas Somnath. INTERSECT Architecture Specification: Use Case Design Patterns (Version 0.5). Technical Report, ORNL/TM-2022/2681, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN, USA, September 1, 2022. DOI 10.2172/1896984.
6. Olga A. Kuchar, Swen Boehm, Thomas Naughton, Suhas Somnath, Ben Mintz, Jack Lange, Scott Atchley, Rohit Srivastava, and Patrick Widener. INTERSECT Architecture Specification: System-of-systems Architecture (Version 0.5). Technical Report, ORNL/TM-2022/2717, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN, USA, September 1, 2022. DOI 10.2172/1968700.

Talks and Lectures

1. Christian Engelmann. The Interconnected Science Ecosystem (INTERSECT). Invited talk at the Hartree Centre, Science and Technology Facilities Council, Daresbury, UK, October 4, 2023.
2. Christian Engelmann. The Interconnected Science Ecosystem (INTERSECT) Architecture. Invited talk at the 20th Smoky Mountains Computational Sciences & Engineering Conference (SMC), Knoxville, TN, USA, August 21-23, 2023.
3. Christian Engelmann. The Interconnected Science Ecosystem (INTERSECT) Architecture. Seminar at the Leibniz Rechenzentrum (LRZ), Garching, Germany, July 10, 2023.
4. Christian Engelmann. The Interconnected Science Ecosystem (INTERSECT) Architecture. Invited talk at the 1st Ecosystems for Smart Autonomous Interconnected Labs (E-SAIL) Workshop, held in conjunction with the 38th ISC High Performance (ISC) 2023, Hamburg, Germany, May 25, 2023.
5. Ben Mintz, Christian Engelmann, Elke Arenholz, and Ryan Coffee. Enabling Self-Driven Experiments for Science through an Interconnected Science Ecosystem (INTERSECT). Panel at the 17th Smoky Mountains Computational Sciences & Engineering Conference (SMC), October 20, 2021.

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