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SoftwareInfrastructure for Sustained Innovation (SI2) is a long-term investment focused on realizing a portion of the Cyberinfrastructure Framework for 21st Century Science and Engineering (CIF21, http://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=504730) vision and catalyzing new thinking, paradigms and practices in science and engineering. CIF21 envisions a linked cyberinfrastructure architecture that integrates large-scale computing, high-speed networks, massive data archives, instruments and major facilities, observatories, experiments, and embedded sensors and actuators, across the nation and the world, and that enables research at unprecedented scales, complexity, resolution, and accuracy by integrating computation, data, and experiments in novel ways. Software is a primary modality through which CIF21 innovation and discovery will be realized. It permeates all aspects and layers of cyberinfrastructure (from application codes and frameworks, programming systems, libraries and system software, to middleware, operating systems, networking and the low-level drivers). The CIF21 software infrastructure must address the complexity of this cyberinfrastructure, accommodating: disruptive hardware trends; ever-increasing data volumes; data integrity, privacy, and confidentiality; security; complex application structures and behaviors; and emerging concerns such as fault-tolerance and energy efficiency. The programs must focus on building robust, reliable and sustainable software that will support and advance sustained scientific innovation and discovery.
 The Division of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure in the Computer & Information Science & Engineering Directorate (CISE/ACI) is partnering with Directorates and Offices across the NSF to support SI2, a long-term comprehensive program focused on realizing a sustained software infrastructure that is an integral part of CIF21.

The Campus Cyberinfrastructure (CC*) program invests in coordinated campus-level networking and cyberinfrastructure improvements, innovation, integration, and engineering for science applications and distributed research projects. Learning and workforce development (LWD) in cyberinfrastructure is explicitly addressed in the program. Science-driven requirements are the primary motivation for any proposed activity.

The Cyberinfrastructure for Sustained Scientific Innovation (CSSI) umbrella program seeks to enable funding opportunities that are flexible and responsive to the evolving and emerging needs in cyberinfrastructure. This program continues the CSSI program by removing the distinction between software and data elements/framework implementations, and instead emphasizing integrated cyberinfrastructure services, quantitative metrics with targets for delivery and usage of these services, and community creation.

This solicitation includes two classes of science data pilot awards: 1. Early Implementations are large "at scale" evaluations, building upon cyberinfrastructure capabilities of existing research communities or recognized community data collections, and extending those data-focused cyberinfrastructure capabilities to additional research communities and domains with broad community engagement. 2. Pilot Demonstrations address advanced cyberinfrastructure challenges across emerging research communities, building upon recognized community data collections and disciplinary research interests, to address specific challenges in science and engineering research.

Advancements in data-driven scientific research depend on trustworthy and reliable cyberinfrastructure. Researchers rely on a variety of networked technologies and software tools to achieve their scientific goals. These may include local or remote instruments, wireless sensors, software programs, operating systems, database servers, high-performance computing, large-scale storage, and other critical infrastructure connected by high-speed networking. This complex, distributed, interconnected global cyberinfrastructure ecosystem presents unique cybersecurity challenges. NSF-funded scientific instruments, sensors and equipment are specialized, highly-visible assets that present attractive targets for both unintentional errors and malicious activity; untrustworthy software or a loss of integrity of the data collected by a scientific instrument may mean corrupt, skewed or incomplete results. Furthermore, often data-driven research, e.g., in the medical field or in the social sciences, requires access to private information, and exposure of such data may cause financial, reputational and/or other damage.

The overall goal of the Cyberinfrastructure for Emerging Science and Engineering Research (CESER) program is to foster the development of innovative cyberinfrastructure (CI) technologies and new means of leveraging existing CI resources to catalyze emerging areas of potentially transformative science and engineering research, including NSF priority areas, national strategic initiatives, and international collaborative research. 

The Cyberinfrastructure for Sustained Scientific Innovation (CSSI) umbrella program encompasses the long-running Data Infrastructure Building Blocks (DIBBs) and Software Infrastructure for Sustained Innovation (SI2) programs, as NSF seeks to enable funding opportunities that are flexible and responsive to the evolving and emerging needs in data and software cyberinfrastructure.

Researchers in all fields of science and engineering are being challenged in two key directions.  The first challenge is to push beyond the current boundaries of knowledge to provide ever-deeper insights through fundamental disciplinary research by addressing increasingly complex questions, which often requires extremely sophisticated integration of theoretical, experimental, observational and simulation and modeling results.   These efforts, which have relied heavily on observing platforms and other data collection efforts, computing facilities, software, advanced networking, analytics, visualization and models have led to important breakthroughs in all areas of science and engineering and represent a very strong bottom-up approach to the necessary research infrastructure.  The second, and more extensive challenge, is to synthesize these fundamental ground breaking efforts across multiple fields to transform scientific research into an endeavor that integrates the deep knowledge and research capabilities developed within the universities, industry and government labs. Individuals, teams and communities need to be able work together; likewise, instruments, facilities (including MREFCs), datasets, and cyber-services must be integrated from the group to campus to national scale. One can imagine secure, geographically distributed infrastructure components including advanced computing facilities, scientific instruments, software environments, advanced networks, data storage capabilities, and the critically important human capital and expertise. Greater understanding is also needed of how scientific and research communities will evolve in the presence of new cyberinfrastructure. 

This program seeks to prepare, nurture, and grow the national scientific research workforce for creating, utilizing, and supporting advanced cyberinfrastructure (CI) to enable and potentially transform fundamental science and engineering research and contribute to the Nation's overall economic competitiveness and security. The goals of this solicitation are to (i) ensure broad adoption of CI tools, methods, and resources by the research community in order to catalyze major research advances and to enhance researchers' abilities to lead the development of new CI; and (ii) integrate core literacy and discipline-appropriate advanced skills in advanced CI as well as computational and data-driven science and engineering into the Nation's educational curriculum/instructional material fabric spanning undergraduate and graduate courses for advancing fundamental research. Pilot and Implementation projects may target one or both of the solicitation goals, while Large-scale Project Conceptualization projects must address both goals. For the purpose of this solicitation, advanced CI is broadly defined as the set of resources, tools, methods, and services for advanced computation, large-scale data handling and analytics, and networking and security for large-scale systems that collectively enable potentially transformative fundamental research.

The Scalable Parallelism in the Extreme (SPX) program aims to support research addressing the challenges of increasing performance in this modern era of parallel computing. This will require a collaborative effort among researchers in multiple areas, from services and applications down to micro-architecture. SPX encompasses all five NSCI Strategic Objectives, including supporting foundational research toward architecture and software approaches that drive performance improvements in the post-Moore's Law era; development and deployment of programmable, scalable, and reusable platforms in the national HPC and scientific cyberinfrastructure ecosystem; increased coherence of data analytic computing and modeling and simulation; and capable extreme-scale computing. Coordination with industrial efforts that pursue related goals are encouraged.

The SI2 program focuses on supporting robust, reliable and sustainable software that will support and advance sustained scientific innovation and discovery. Thus, proposals are strongly encouraged to describe their approach to quality software development through a defined software engineering process that includes software testing, the appropriate use of analysis tools and capabilities such as those made available through the Software Assurance Marketplace (SWAMP, https://continuousassurance.org/), and collaborations with resources such as Software Carpentry (http://software-carpentry.org/) and the Center for Trustworthy Scientific Cyberinfrastructure (CTSC, http://trustedci.org/), in order to gain access to expertise where needed, such as in software design and engineering, as well as in cybersecurity.

The intent of this solicitation is to request proposals from organizations willing to serve as service providers (SPs) within the NSF Innovative High-Performance Computing (HPC) program to provide advanced cyberinfrastructure (CI) capabilities and/or services in production operations to support the full range of computational- and data-intensive research across all of science and engineering (S&E). The current solicitation is intended to complement previous NSF investments in advanced computational infrastructure by provisioning resources, broadly defined in this solicitation to include systems and/or services, in two categories: The first is intended to complement previous NSF investments in advanced computational infrastructure.  Consistent with the ACI Strategic Plan, the current solicitation is focused on expanding the use of high end resources to a much larger and more diverse community.   The second type is devoted to the increasing pressure on the existing infrastructure to store and process very large amounts of data coming from simulation and from experimental resources such as telescopes, genome data banks or sensors.

NSF's Harnessing the Data Revolution (HDR) Big Idea is a national-scale activity to enable new modes of data-driven discovery that will allow fundamental questions to be asked and answered at the frontiers of science and engineering. Through this NSF-wide activity, HDR will generate new knowledge and understanding, and accelerate discovery and innovation. The HDR vision is realized through an interrelated set of efforts in: Foundations of data science; Algorithms and systems for data science; Data-intensive science and engineering; Data cyberinfrastructure; and Education and workforce development. Each of these efforts is designed to amplify the intrinsically multidisciplinary nature of the emerging field of data science. The HDR Big Idea will establish theoretical, technical, and ethical frameworks that will be applied to tackle data-intensive problems in science and engineering, contributing to data-driven decision-making that impacts society.

NSF's Harnessing the Data Revolution (HDR) Big Idea is a national-scale activity to enable new modes of data-driven discovery that will allow fundamental questions to be asked and answered at the frontiers of science and engineering. Through this NSF-wide activity, HDR will generate new knowledge and understanding, and accelerate discovery and innovation. The HDR vision is realized through an interrelated set of efforts in: Foundations of data science; Algorithms and systems for data science; Data-intensive science and engineering; Data cyberinfrastructure; and Education and workforce development. Each of these efforts is designed to amplify the intrinsically multidisciplinary nature of the emerging field of data science. The HDR Big Idea will establish theoretical, technical, and ethical frameworks that will be applied to tackle data-intensive problems in science and engineering, contributing to data-driven decision-making that impacts society.

he intent of this solicitation is to request proposals from organizations willing to serve as service providers (SPs) within the NSF Innovative High-Performance Computing (HPC) program to provide advanced cyberinfrastructure (CI) capabilities and/or services in production operations to support the full range of computational- and data-intensive research across all of science and engineering (S&E). The current solicitation is intended to complement previous NSF investments in advanced computational infrastructure by provisioning resources, broadly defined in this solicitation to include systems and/or services, in two categories: Category I, Capacity Systems: production computational resources maximizing the capacity provided to support the broad range of computation and data analytics needs in S&E research; and Category II, Innovative Prototypes/Testbeds: innovative forward-looking capabilities deploying novel technologies, architectures, usage modes, etc., and exploring new target applications, methods, and paradigms for S&E discoveries.

This solicitation calls for developing innovative, scalable training programs to address the emerging needs and unresolved bottlenecks in scientific and engineering workforce development of targeted, multidisciplinary communities, at the postsecondary level and beyond, leading to transformative changes in the state of workforce preparedness for advanced CI in the short and long terms. A primary goal is to broaden CI access and adoption by (i) increasing or deepening accessibility of methods and resources of advanced CI and of computational and data science and engineering by a wide range of institutions and scientific communities with lower levels of CI adoption to date; and (ii) harnessing the capabilities of larger segments of diverse underrepresented groups. Proposals from and in partnership with the aforementioned communities are especially encouraged