NSF funds the next five years of IOWarp

Thrilled to share that the National Science Foundation has funded IOWarp for five years, 2024 through 2029. It is a collaborative award among Illinois Tech’s Gnosis Research Center, The HDF Group, and the University of Utah, and it is the largest single research investment my group has been part of. The details are in the NSF record for OAC-2411318. Xian-He Sun is the principal investigator; I am a co-PI and the architect.

What we are building

IOWarp bridges HPC, AI, and data analytics with one idea: scientific workflows need a context layer, not only a faster byte pipe. The runtime moves data across storage tiers, reshapes it across formats, and exposes it to agents and people through tools with explicit contracts. It builds directly on Hermes, our multi-tier buffering system, and on years of work on labels, tracing, and task-based I/O.

The original announcement mentioned a specialized language model for natural-language data exploration. The plan evolved. What shipped instead is the CLIO ecosystem: a context store, a tool kit of MCP servers, a science agent, and a coding agent, which you can read about in the CLIO story.

What the award changes

Five years is enough time to do systems work properly: architecture, interfaces, implementation, integration, evaluation, documentation, releases, and time for people outside the lab to find the assumptions we missed. It also means students can own substantial pieces of the platform rather than isolated experiments.

An award is runway. The proof is in releases, and that is what the IOWarp organization has been accumulating since.

Updated August 2026 with links to what the project became.