Partnership Knowledge Center

Kimberlyn Mousseau
Idaho National Laboratory

The Partnership Knowledge Center (PKC) is an effort to establish a virtual knowledge center for information management and distribution within the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP). The overall mission of the PKC is to facilitate GNEP’s success by providing knowledge management and computing infrastructure capabilities for technical collaboration and analysis among GNEP partners. The Idaho National Laboratory formed the Partnership to address the areas of computing investment that were identified during the joint Office of Nuclear Energy and Office of Science Modeling and Simulation Workshop held August 15-17, 2006 in Washington, D.C. PKC participants include representatives from 10 major DOE laboratories.

Shortly after the Partnership was formed, participants explored several areas of investment including data formats and storage, data certification methods, metadata, computer architecture for multi-site access, access standards, and collaboration tools. This exercise led to the definition of the following goals:

• Establish a virtual knowledge center to manage (e.g., identify, describe, format, integrate, collect, protect and disseminate) all forms of data to enable analysis relevant to the overall goals of the GNEP program.
• Lead the national and international efforts to adopt, develop, and maintain the standardization of critical data and metadata formats to validate and improve data accuracy, consistency, and accessibility.
• Establish a GNEP collaboration architecture for sharing data and information within the partnership through the adoption and support of open protocols, tools, services, and distributed data resources.
• Identify and resolve access control issues including those arising from export controlled and proprietary information.

Once full funding is approved, the PKC is prepared to launch a proof-of-concept system within one year. It will be developed using existing computational resources sufficient for prototyping the ability to extract and acquire large data sets with corresponding metadata and additional knowledge that will enable GNEP scientists and engineers to make informed decisions. The knowledge to be ingested will include program input data, output data, documentation, engineering drawings, and annotation. Data formats used to store the data will be either in their initial form or an industry recognized format. Initially the proof-of-concept system will be developed to support a subset of the GNEP community but by 2012 and upon full implementation the goal is to support hundreds of users.

David E. Keyes, a leading professor of computational mathematics with strong ties to national research laboratories, is the Chairman of the PKC Steering Committee. Dr. Keyes is the Fu Foundation Professor of Applied Mathematics at Columbia University’s Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science. He is an affiliate of the Center for Data Intensive Computing at Brookhaven National Laboratory and is the acting director of the Institute for Scientific Computing Research at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL).

Contact
Kimberlyn C. Mousseau
Partnership Program Manager
Idaho National Laboratory
Advanced Nuclear Energy Systems Integration
kimberlyn.mousseau@inl.gov

Go back