NSF National Data Infrastructure
Bridging research communities through shared data, workflows,
and AI.
NSF BRIDGE gives research labs and communities the software to deploy their own platform for scalable, on-demand computing, so their users can share datasets, analysis pipelines as workflows, and machine learning models.
An NSF-funded collaboration of UC Irvine, UCLA, and the University of Michigan
Newly funded · NSF Award #2609582
NSF establishes the BRIDGE National Data Infrastructure
The National Science Foundation has awarded $8.9M to establish BRIDGE: A National Data Infrastructure to Democratize Multi-disciplinary Data Science and AI for Research Labs and Communities, led by UC Irvine with UCLA and the University of Michigan.
BRIDGE will lower the barriers to modern data science and AI for scientists across fields such as criminology, public health, and neurobiology — providing an open, supported, and shareable infrastructure for building, reusing, and collaborating on data-analysis workflows, datasets, and machine learning models, built on Apache Texera (Incubating).
View the award on NSF.govAward at a glance
Award
Amount
$8,998,359
Period
Jul 2026 – Jun 2029
Program
Data Cyberinfrastructure (NSF CISE / OAC)
Lead PI
Chen Li (UC Irvine)
How it works
From your data to shared discovery, in three steps
01
Deploy
Stand up your own web-based platform, on your own infrastructure or the cloud, with no heavy setup.
02
Share
Publish datasets, analysis pipelines as workflows, and machine learning models for your community to reuse.
03
Flexible
Run it in the cloud or on your own local computers — whichever best fits your community’s resources and scale.
Who it is for
Made for the people who move research forward
Research labs
Give your group a shared, reproducible workspace for data, code, and results.
Scientific communities
Connect groups that rarely share tools, so data and knowledge flow across boundaries.
Domain scientists
Do modern data science and AI with little or no code, even without local computing.
Research
Five initial research communities
Following NSF’s guidance, NSF BRIDGE is starting with five research communities, bringing shared datasets, workflows, and ML models to groups that rarely share them.
Life SciencesVision
Shared datasets, workflows, and ML models for vision research.
More coming soon
NeuroscienceBrain Mapping
Collaborative pipelines for brain-mapping data, from imaging to analysis.
More coming soon
Genetics & HealthMetabolic Traits
Shared analysis of metabolic-trait datasets across labs.
More coming soon
Social SciencesSocial Sciences
Reproducible workflows for large-scale social-science data.
More coming soon
ComputingHigh Performance Computing (HPC)
On-demand, scalable computing for data- and GPU-intensive research.
More coming soonBuilt on open source
Powered by Apache Texera (Incubating)
NSF BRIDGE provides not just software, but also services such as training, documentation, support, and scalable, on-demand computing, so any community can run their own platform.
