The Modern Research Data Portal: a design pattern for networked, data-intensive science

Abstract

We describe best practices for providing convenient, high-speed, secure access to large data via research data portals. We capture these best practices in a new design pattern, the Modern Research Data Portal, that disaggregates the traditional monolithic web-based data portal to achieve orders-of-magnitude increases in data transfer performance, support new deployment architectures that decouple control logic from data storage, and reduce development and operations costs. We introduce the design pattern; explain how it leverages high-performance data enclaves and cloud-based data management services; review representative examples at research laboratories and universities, including both experimental facilities and supercomputer sites; describe how to leverage Python APIs for authentication, authorization, data transfer, and data sharing; and use coding examples to demonstrate how these APIs can be used to implement a range of research data portal capabilities. Sample code at a companion web site, https://docs.globus.org/mrdp, provides application skeletons that readers can adapt to realize their own research data portals.