Brokering between tenants for an international materials acceleration platform

Abstract

The efficient utilization of resources in accelerated materials science necessitates flexible, reconfigurable software-defined research workflows. We demonstrate a brokering approach to modular and asynchronous research orchestration to integrate multiple laboratories in a cooperative multitenancy platform across disciplines and modalities. To the best of our knowledge, this constitutes the first internationally distributed materials acceleration platform (MAP) linked via a passive brokering server, which is demonstrated through a battery electrolyte workflow capable of determining density, viscosity, ionic conductivity, heat capacity, diffusion coefficients, transference numbers, and radial distribution functions that ran in five countries over the course of 2 weeks. We discuss the lessons learned from multitenancy and fault tolerance and chart a way to a universal battery MAP with fully ontology-linked schemas and cost-aware orchestration.