Grant Details

The Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure (OAC) enables science and engineering research and education by developing, creating, and supporting secure, advanced, scalable, and global research cyberinfrastructure (CI). OAC investments emphasize cyberinfrastructure that is:

• Science-driven: Promotes science and engineering excellence, enabling fundamentally new scientific and engineering advances; benefits science and engineering communities beyond initial targets;
• Innovative: Emphasizes unique NSF contributions; builds the capability, capacity, and cohesiveness of a national CI ecosystem; considers both human and technical aspects of the CI;
• Collaborative: Fosters partnerships and community development; actively engages CI experts, specialists, and scientists working in concert with domain scientists who are users of CI;
• Leveraged: Builds on existing, recognized capabilities;
• Strategic: Encourages measurement of progress and sharing of results; and
• Sustained: Provides benefits beyond the participants and the lifetime of the award.

The goal of the CSSI umbrella program is to create an ecosystem of cyberinfrastructure services that scales from individuals or small groups of researchers/innovators to large communities. The CSSI program anticipates four classes of awards:

Elements: These awards target small groups that will create and deploy robust services for which there is a demonstrated need, and that will advance one or more significant areas of science and engineering. It is expected that the created elements will be disseminated to the community as reusable services, with the potential for sustainability. The development approach may support the hardening of early prototypes and/or expanding functionality to increase end-user relevance.

Framework Implementations: These awards target larger, interdisciplinary teams organized around the development and application of common services aimed at solving common research problems faced by NSF researchers in one or more areas of science and engineering, resulting in a sustainable community framework providing CI services to a diverse community or communities. Some awards are anticipated to be continuing grants, where funds will be released annually subject to agreed-upon milestones, based on approval by NSF and the availability of funds.

Planning Grants for Community Cyberinfrastructure: Planning grants focus on the establishment of long-term cyberinfrastructure services, which would serve a research community of substantial size and disciplinary breadth.

Community Cyberinfrastructure Implementations: These Community Cyberinfrastructure Implementations focus on the establishment of long-term 5 hubs of excellence in cyberinfrastructure services and technologies, which will serve a research community of substantial size and disciplinary breadth. For example, the outcomes of a Community Software Cyberinfrastructure go beyond the software itself, including the development infrastructure and process, and the deployment and operation of sustained services successfully responding to science and engineering challenges, and enabling transformative new science and engineering. These Community Cyberinfrastructures will provide expertise, processes and architectures, resources and implementation mechanisms to transform computational science and engineering innovations and community software into robust and sustained services for enabling science and engineering, which in turn will transform research practices and productivity. Community Cyberinfrastructure proposals will bring together multidisciplinary teams of domain scientists and engineers, computer scientists, software and data engineers, and technologists and educators.