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The lack of a readily accessible, tightly integrated data fabric connecting high-speed networking, storage, and computing services remains a critical barrier to the democratization of scientific discovery. To address this challenge, we are building National Science Data Fabric (NSDF), a holistic ecosystem to facilitate domain scientists in their daily research. NSDF comprises networking, storage, and computing services, as well as outreach initiatives. In this paper, we present a testbed integrating three services (i.e., networking, storage, and computing). We evaluate their performance. Specifically, we study the networking services and their throughput and latency with a focus on academic cloud providers; the storage services and their performance with a focus on data movement using file system mappers for both academic and commercial clouds; and computing orchestration services focusing on commercial cloud providers. We discuss NSDF's potential to increase scalability and usability as it decreases time-to-discovery across scientific domains. 

This perspective article presents the vision of combining findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR) Digital Objects with the National Science Data Fabric (NSDF) to enhance data accessibility, scientific discovery, and education. Integrating FAIR Digital Objects into the NSDF overcomes data access barriers and facilitates the extraction of machine-actionable metadata in alignment with FAIR principles. The article discusses examples of climate simulations and materials science workflows and establishes the groundwork for a dataflow design that prioritizes inclusivity, web-centricity, and a network-first approach to democratize data access and create opportunities for research and collaboration in the scientific community.