September 4, 2025
By Holly Smith
The University of Chicago has received funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to develop SHARED, the Secure Hub for Access, Reliability, and Exchange of Data. This new storage platform will advance research through robust capabilities for data storage, accessibility, sharing, and integration with national and global data federations. It will provide critical storage capacity for research and supporting data science curricula development and education.
Designed as a cornerstone of UChicago’s data lifecycle strategy, from collection and analysis to publication and archiving, SHARED will integrate with the University’s institutional repository, Knowledge@UChicago, and connect to national research networks like the Open Science Grid (OSG). The SHARED project and platform are led by the University of Chicago Library and Research Computing Center (RCC), with contributions from University IT Services, Data Science Institute, and Physical Sciences Division.
“SHARED’s novel architecture is an exemplar system, providing end-to-end infrastructure that seamlessly integrates cost-effective storage with the University repository for published data and the OSG. It will serve as an essential bridge between data and discovery, benefiting researchers, students, and collaborators worldwide.” said H. Birali Runesha, Director of the Research Computing Center.
The SHARED platform will be essential for enabling partner faculty to meet federal requirements for data management and sharing. By supporting projects in fields ranging from cosmology and particle physics to linguistics and neuroscience, SHARED will help scientists store, access, and share massive datasets that drive discovery. Examples include data from dark matter searches, cosmic microwave background surveys, large-scale astrophysical simulations, high-energy physics experiments, and research on language, learning, and memory. Specific projects include Cosmic Reionization on Computers, Function of Coordinated Hippocampal-cortical Activity in Learning, Grammatical Variation and Change in Sign Languages, How Children Use Gestures with Language, Kinetic Simulations of Astrophysical Plasmas, KOTO particle physics experiment probing rare Kaon decay, and, XENON underground physics experiment searching for dark matter using liquid Xenon detectors, and the South Pole telescope that studies the cosmic microwave background from Antarctica.
SHARED is designed to enable seamless collaboration with external partners, national and international scientific collaborations, and the national compute and data ecosystems. It will also support data management from large experiments and observations. “The SHARED resources will significantly enhance the ability of the international South Pole Telescope science team to produce groundbreaking results in a timely and efficient manner,” said Professor John Carlstrom, Subramanyan Chandrasekhar Distinguished Service Professor and Director of the South Pole Telescope. This integration is expected to ensure that researchers can access the data held on the SHARED infrastructure while leveraging computational workloads from other academic campuses and national-scale high-performance computing centers.
SHARED will host both published research and the associated data needed to validate findings, with persistent identifiers to ensure discoverability through Knowledge@UChicago (administered by the UChicago Library). It plays an essential role in the UChicago Library repository’s ability to store large data sets. “Access to data is essential for advancing scientific discovery and maintaining research integrity, said Torsten Reimer, University Librarian and Dean of the University Library. “SHARED simplifies research data management for faculty by providing secure storage and facilitating seamless data sharing workflows. By increasing the visibility and impact of UChicago’s world-class research, SHARED is a cornerstone of our commitment to building a comprehensive UChicago Research Data Service.” In the future, SHARED and Knowledge@UChicago will allow for filtering and in-situ analysis of data, offering researchers the means to disseminate their data and research findings in more interactive ways than traditional journals allow, while allowing users the ability to verify and computationally reproduce data, and directly explore large datasets.
Beyond advancing science, SHARED will foster education and workforce development in data science. Partnerships with community colleges, internships, and training programs will prepare students for careers relying on research computing and data management. As it reaches full production, SHARED will also serve as a model that other institutions can replicate.
This work is supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) under Award No 2346746, which we gratefully acknowledge.