Outcomes of the First Overall Architecture Workshop

The path towards an overall architecture for the National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI) is a participatory process: integrating the distributed and grass-roots tailored setups of the 26 NFDI consortia into a federated and interoperable ecosystem. To address this, the NFDI Working Group Overall Architecture (WG OA) of the NFDI Section Common Infrastructures (Section Infra) has initiated a series of workshops. The first was held on November 26-27, 2025, at the GWDG in Göttingen and a second one is planned on April 14-15, 2026 at the RWTH Aachen. This document recapitulates the results of the first expert forum with contributions from the 16 NFDI consortia that attended (out of 26), as well as from 5 basic services of Base4NFDI. The representatives present in the workshop collectively shaped and agreed on a layered reference architecture defining common technical building blocks, including identity and access management, storage services, and compute infrastructures. This approach creates an agreed understanding, decoupling infrastructure provision from scientific applications and supporting both academic and commercial infrastructure providers.