The National Research Platform (NRP), formerly known as the Pacific Research Platform (PRP), is a collaborative, multi-institutional effort to create a shared national infrastructure for data-driven research. Backed by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Department of Energy (DOE), the NRP provides high-performance computing resources, data storage and management services, and network connectivity capabilities to researchers across various disciplines (e.g., the earth sciences and health sciences). The foundation of the NRP includes components such as the Kubernetes-based Nautilus storage cluster, data transfer nodes, science gateways, and virtualized computing environments, all of which are intended to enable location-agnostic access to data and computing resources.

Our group not only leverages Nautilus for other WorDS initiatives (including the BurnPro3D and WIFIRE Edge efforts of the WIFIRE Lab), but contributes to the development and implementation of best practices for data management, sharing, and analysis, which are critical components of the NRP's mission to enable data-driven scientific discovery across multiple disciplines. In particular, from 2017 to 2021, our group contributed towards the development of a cloud of hundreds of affordable Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), networked together with a variety of neural network machines to facilitate development of next generation cognitive computing, as part of an NRP initiative called CHASE-CI.