This paper examines how Data Readiness for AI (DRAI) principles apply to leadership-scale scientific datasets used to train foundation models. We analyze archetypal workflows across four representative domains - climate, nuclear fusion, bio/health, and materials - to identify common preprocessing patterns and domain-specific constraints. We introduce a two-dimensional readiness framework composed of Data Readiness Levels (raw to AI-ready) and Data Processing Stages (ingest to shard), both tailored to high performance computing (HPC) environments. This framework outlines key challenges in transforming scientific data for scalable AI training, emphasizing transformer-based generative models. Together, these dimensions form a conceptual maturity matrix that characterizes scientific data readiness and guides infrastructure development toward standardized, cross-domain support for scalable and reproducible AI for science.
@article{arxiv.2507.23018,
title = {Data Readiness for Scientific AI at Scale},
author = {Wesley Brewer and Patrick Widener and Valentine Anantharaj and Feiyi Wang and Tom Beck and Arjun Shankar and Sarp Oral},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2507.23018},
year = {2025}
}