Accelerating the discovery of advanced materials is essential for human welfare and sustainable, clean energy. In this paper, we introduce the Materials Project (www.materialsproject.org), a core program of the Materials Genome Initiative that uses high-throughput computing to uncover the properties of all known inorganic materials. This open dataset can be accessed through multiple channels for both interactive exploration and data mining. The Materials Project also seeks to create open-source platforms for developing robust, sophisticated materials analyses. Future efforts will enable users to perform ‘‘rapid-prototyping’’ of new materials in silico, and provide researchers with new avenues for cost-effective, data-driven materials design. © 2013 Author(s). All article content, except where otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.