ASCR Workshop on In Situ Data Management
In January 2019, the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science program in Advanced Scientific Computing Research, convened a workshop to identify priority research directions for in situ data management (ISDM). The workshop defined ISDM as the practices, capabilities, and procedures to control the organization of data and enable the coordination and communication among heterogeneous tasks, executing simultaneously in a high-performance computing system, cooperating toward a common objective. The workshop revealed two primary, interdependent motivations for processing and managing data in situ. The first motivation is that the in situ methodology enables scientific discovery from a broad range of data sources over a wide scale of computing platforms: leadership-class systems, clusters, clouds, workstations, and embedded devices at the edge. The successful development of ISDM capabilities will benefit real-time decision-making, design optimization, and data-driven scientific discovery. The second motivation is the need to decrease data volumes. ISDM can make critical contributions to managing large data volumes from computations and experiments to minimize data movement, save storage space, and boost resource efficiency, often while simultaneously increasing scientific precision.