Scaling the Materials Project with MongoDB and AWS

This technical report details the transformation of the Materials Project (MP) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which has rapidly scaled to over 616,000 users globally by leveraging MongoDB and AWS services. The MP platform provides open access to a vast repository of computed data on inorganic materials, facilitating innovation in materials research. As user demand surged, the MP team modernized its infrastructure to support this growth, transitioning to a microservices-based cloud architecture and utilizing MongoDB Atlas on AWS for a fully managed database solution. The report outlines the benefits of this modernization, including a 2.3x growth in user base since the new framework's launch in May 2022, and highlights the platform's ability to manage over 400 terabytes of data with 99.98% uptime. The MP's collaborative model allows researchers worldwide to access and contribute to its data, promoting deeper collaboration in the materials science community and accelerating innovation in various applications.