The Criteria for Winning Research Grants Has Fundamentally Changed.
Data Management Plans (DMPs) are no longer a simple checkbox. Funding bodies like the NSF and NIH now scrutinize your data architecture as a primary measure of project feasibility and collaborative potential. A legacy approach to data storage and management is a competitive liability.
The Hidden Bottleneck is the “Data Tax” on Your Researchers’ Time
For the past decade, myriad studies have estimated the time researchers spend simply wrangling data for their research – anywhere from 30-80%. There are several variables that influence those estimates, including the organization, application, skillsets and tools used. That said, ”it is impossible to deny that sourcing data for analytical and data science uses is a significant effort, regardless of the percentage cited,” writes Neil Radan in Diginomica.
Too often researchers get bogged down in a constant “copy and wait” cycle of moving data from instrument to clusters, and from clusters to archives, and then from archives in the cloud.
Every hour spent waiting for data is an hour of grant-funded time not spent on science. This time-to-science gap delays analysis, slows collaboration with other labs, and ultimately extends the time it takes to publish critical findings.
If your proposal relies on copying petabytes of data between silos, it will fail technical review on efficiency and GPU utilization metrics.
The Solution Requires an Architectural Shift from Data Silos to a Global Data Platform
Your next grant requires an architecture that decouples data from physical storage hardware, ensures data sovereignty, and feeds GPUs at line rate across disparate locations.
Hammerspace enables an architecture where data flows seamlessly between instruments, on-premesis clusters, and the cloud, using the hardware you already own.
The Hammerspace Data Platform uniquely transforms all of your data on existing storage into a single, unified global namespace, allowing any application, any GPU, on any infrastructure, to access data without disruptive and costly data migrations.
As Radan notes, “Today’s volume of data adds complexity to the problem, but making sense of it at scale is needed.”
Our platform automates the movement of massive datasets from climate modeling, structural biology and genomics, physics, and other research areas and instruments directly to HPC clusters and AI platforms for analysis – without manual data copying. In turn, researchers and data scientists can:
- Accelerate Discovery Pipelines – Eliminate data bottlenecks between data generation, analysis, and AI workflows with high-throughput, low-latency data access.
- Enable Global Collaboration – Give researchers, clinicians, and partners around the world fast access to shared data sets through a single global namespace.
- Simplify Hybrid Cloud Data Management – Capture and ingest data on-prem, process it in the cloud, and share with researchers at different sites – seamlessly and without manual data copy.
- Optimize Data Storage Costs – Automatically tier and place data on the most efficient storage resources to manage project data across the entire lifecycle
As one example, Vanderbilt University’s Advanced Computing Center for Research and Education (ACCRE) saw a 48% reduction in storage costs by unifying silos and optimizing data placement with Hammerspace.
Introducing the Hammerspace NIH/NSF Grant Infrastructure Kit
We can help researchers and grant writers to articulate a data architecture where data flows seamlessly between instruments, on-premesis clusters, and the cloud, using the hardware you already own.
This is why we’ve created a Grant Infrastructure Kit, a strategic guide for principal investigators, research computing directors, and grant writers to accelerate publication and secure funding.
The kit includes pre-written, defensible language to insert directly into your NSF, NIH, DOE, and private grant proposals. This can significantly lower the friction of writing the “Data Management Plan” and “Facilities & Resources” sections of your grants, turning your data architecture into a winning argument for funding.
It’s defensible, technical, and ready to copy/paste.
Download the kit today to access the following:
- Facilities Template: Pre-written text describing a High-Performance Global Data Platform. Just fill in the blanks.
- DMS Plan Boilerplate: Specific responses addressing the 2023 NIH Policy for data preservation and access (FAIR).
- Budget Calculator: Spreadsheet to help you itemize data orchestration costs as an allowable grant expense.
- Letter of Support: Customizable letter from Hammerspace confirming platform capabilities for your reviewers.
Learn More
- Product Page: Hammerspace Data Platform Overview
- Data Unchained Podcast: Overcoming Data Silos in Life Sciences w/ Adam Marko
- White Paper: Powering Decentralized Life Sciences and Multiomics Research with Unstructured Data Orchestration
- Contact Hammerspace’s team of experts to book a meeting, set up a 1:1 demo or take a self-guided tour.
