Within the 2025 call “Data Storage Systems to Strengthen the NFDI (Nationale Forschungsdateninfrastruktur)” issued by the German Research Foundation (DFG), University Computing Centre of Heidelberg University (URZ) and SCC submitted a joint proposal as a provider consortium under the title “bwData4NFDI”, which has recently been approved by the DFG. With substantial support from the Ministry of Science, Research and the Arts of Baden‑Württemberg (MWK), which is providing half of the total funding under an Article 91b agreement, the Large-Scale Data Facility (LSDF) will be expanded at its operational sites in Heidelberg and Karlsruhe by several dozen petabytes of disk‑based online storage and tape‑based offline storage.
Based on a nationwide assessment of demand across the NFDI, this additional storage capacity will be made available to the following NFDI consortia operating throughout Germany: DAPHNE4NFDI, NFDI4Bioimage, NFDI4Cat, NFDI4Chem, NFDI4Culture, NFDI4Health, NFDI4ING, NFDI-MatWerk and PUNCH4NFDI.
The successful proposal forms part of a coordinated, joint strategy among the centres of the National High‑Performance Computing Alliance (NHR) and builds on the “Framework Concept of Baden‑Württemberg Universities for Data‑Intensive Services – bwDATA Phase III.”
Contact: Dr. Martin Baumann (URZ), Dr. Doris Ressmann, Prof. Dr. Achim Streit (SCC)