Outcomes of the First Overall Architecture Workshop
The path towards an overall architecture for the National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI) is a participatory process: integrating the distributed and grass-roots tailored setups of the 26 NFDI consortia into a federated and interoperable ecosystem. To address this, the NFDI Working Group Overall Architecture (WG OA) of the NFDI Section Common Infrastructures (Section Infra) has initiated a series of workshops. The first was held on November 26-27, 2025, at the GWDG in Göttingen and a second one is planned on April 14-15, 2026 at the RWTH Aachen. This document recapitulates the results of the first expert forum with contributions from the 16 NFDI consortia that attended (out of 26), as well as from 5 basic services of Base4NFDI. The representatives present in the workshop collectively shaped and agreed on a layered reference architecture defining common technical building blocks, including identity and access management, storage services, and compute infrastructures. This approach creates an agreed understanding, decoupling infrastructure provision from scientific applications and supporting both academic and commercial infrastructure providers.
Authors
- Sonja Schimmler (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8786-7250)
- Michael Beckstette (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3707-1692)
- Peter Gietz (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8310-2015)
- Stephan Hachinger (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8341-1478)
- Ulrik Stervbo (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2831-8868)
- Moritz Schubotz (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7141-4997)
- Martin Reinhardt (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1213-5135)
- Josh Moore
- Philipp Wieder (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6992-1866)
- Christian Schäfer‐Neth
- Marius Politze (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3175-0659)
- H Enke
- Matthias Lange
- Alois Georg Wieshuber
- Alexander Sczyrba
Institutions
- FIZ Karlsruhe – Leibniz Institute for Information Infrastructure (DE)
- University of Freiburg (DE)
- Forschungszentrum Jülich (DE)
- Bielefeld University (DE)
- Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (DE)
- Gesellschaft für wissenschaftliche Datenverarbeitung mbH Göttingen (DE)
- Bavarian State Archives (DE)
- ZB MED - Information Centre for Life Sciences (DE)
- Weizenbaum Institute (DE)
- Leibniz-Institut für Pflanzengenetik und Kulturpflanzenforschung (IPK) (DE)
- Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (DE)
- Technische Universität Berlin (DE)
- Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft (DE)
- Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin (DE)
- RWTH Aachen University (DE)
- Ruhr University Bochum (DE)
- Leipzig University (DE)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
- Published
- 2026-02-24
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18755449
- Primary Topic
- Research Data Management Practices
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00