The NOMAD (Novel Materials Discovery) project began with the NOMAD Repository, founded by Claudia Draxl (HU Berlin) and Matthias Scheffler (FHI Berlin) within a bilateral project funded by the Einstein Foundation Berlin. It was made publicly available in 2014 in cooperation with the Max Planck Computing and Data Facility, which has been running the NOMAD infrastructure since then.
Between 2015 and 2018, NOMAD was substantially extended within the HORIZON 2020 European Center of Excellence "The NOMAD Laboratory CoE", with 13 partners, led by Matthias Scheffler. Since then, it supports more than 40 computer codes, and provides services such as the NOMAD Encyclopedia and the NOMAD AI Toolkit.
In 2017, the non-profit association FAIR-DI was established as an initiative between Germany and the Netherlands, and quickly became a more international endeavor. The aims were to establish an international research data infrastructure extending beyond theory, and to seek long-term funding, e.g. to allow NOMAD to become a permanent institution. Matthias Scheffler is the current chairperson of FAIR-DI. Claudia Draxl is a member of the executive board.
In 2020, the new HORIZON 2020 European Center of Excellence "NOMAD CoE" continued with a different focus. This CoE brings ab initio codes and AI tools to exascale performance and handles extreme-scale data. It is jointly coordinated by Matthias Scheffler (spokesperson) and Claudia Draxl (deputy).
Since October 2021, the main developments for the NOMAD Lab have been happening in the NOMAD Data Center at HU Berlin (NOMAD HUB). This center was established to host FAIRmat, the NFDI consortium for condensed matter and the chemical physics of solids. FAIRmat is led by Claudia Draxl and co-led by Christoph Koch. Matthias Scheffler was deputy chair until March 2022.
The NOMAD Laboratory at the FHI is the research group of Matthias Scheffler, with a strong focus on thermal and electrical transport from first principles and the development and application of artificial intelligence methods. Scheffler and his group also have office space at IRIS Adlershof at HU Berlin, attached to Claudia Draxl’s research group. Both groups jointly supervise PhD students and contribute to the developments of the NOMAD Laboratory.
The Repository allows researchers to share electronic structure code simulations in terms of publishing input and output files. This is now part of the public NOMAD service and NOMAD Oasis where you can still upload and share files.
The Archive is the sum of all processed data and provides a unified representation of all data that is independent from codes. This is now part of public NOMAD service and NOMAD Oasis where you can view, access, and download the processed data.
The Encyclopedia allows users to see, compare, explore, and understand computed materials data and is based on the processed NOMAD data. This is now integrated into the public NOMAD service to create a materials-centered FAIRmat Portal.
The Analytics Toolkit, now Artificial Intelligence Toolkit, is a set of Jupyter notebooks that analyze processed NOMAD data. The ability to run Jupyter (including AI Toolkit notebooks) and other tools is now being integrated into the public NOMAD service and NOMAD Oasis.
