Debbie Bard is a physicist with 20 years of experience working in cosmology, particle physics, AI and HPC. She heads the Science Engagement and Workflows department at NERSC, providing HPC, data, and AI services to over 12,000 users. She has led major projects integrating multi-facility computing infrastructure, including LBNL’s Superfacility initiative. She is also Product Manager for the American Science Cloud (part of the DOE’s Genesis Mission AI Platform), a new distributed AI infrastructure platform for DOE researchers.
Presentation Title (Co-Presenting with Patrick Huck):
Building the American Science Cloud: Federated Services, Zero-Trust Architecture, and Early Lessons
Presentation Abstract:
The American Science Cloud (AmSC) is building a secure, federated platform that connects AI models, scientific data, workflows, and computing resources across DOE laboratories, leadership computing facilities, experimental facilities, and commercial cloud providers. Its goal is to enable researchers to discover data and models, access large-scale computing, and execute AI-enabled workflows across institutional boundaries.
This talk will present both the emerging AmSC service ecosystem and the architecture that supports it. We will describe early capabilities including federated single sign-on, the Model Access Gateway, data and model services, common APIs, and tools for operating across distributed DOE resources. We will also introduce AmSC’s federated zero-trust approach, in which human, agent, and workload identities remain attributable across trust boundaries and access is governed through project-scoped credentials, policy enforcement, and auditable delegation.We will share lessons from integrating early science workflows and bringing independently developed services into a coherent platform. These experiences highlight that federation is not only an identity or networking problem: it also requires common interfaces, operational discipline, and close collaboration among facilities, service teams, and scientific users.