CFDA#
47.070; 47.083
|
|
Funder Type
Federal Government
|
IT Classification
A - Primarily intended to fund technology
|
|
|
Authority
National Science Foundation (NSF)
Summary
The Campus Cyberinfrastructure (CC*) program invests in coordinated campus-level cyberinfrastructure improvements, innovation, integration, and engineering for science applications and distributed research projects. Projects that help overcome disparities in cyber-connectivity associated with geographic location, and thereby advance the geography of innovation and enable populations based in these locales to become more nationally competitive in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) research and education are particularly encouraged. Science-driven requirements are the primary motivation for any proposed activity.
For FY24, CC* awards will be supported in five program areas:
- Area (1) Data Driven Networking Infrastructure (Campus or Region),
- Area (2) Computing and the Computing Continuum (Campus or Region),
- Area (3) Network Integration and Applied Innovation (Small or Large),
- Area (4) Data Storage and Digital Archives (Campus or Region), and
- Area (5) Strategy (Campus or Region)
All proposals submitted to the CC* program, except for submissions in response to Area (5) Strategy, must include a Campus CI plan within which the proposed CI improvements are conceived, designed, and implemented in the context of a coherent campus-wide strategy and approach to CI that is integrated horizontally intra-campus and vertically with regional and national CI investments and best practices. This Campus CI plan must be included as a Supplementary Document and is limited to no more than 5 pages. Proposals missing a Campus CI Plan as a supplementary document will be returned without review. The website, http://fasterdata.es.net/campusCIplanning/, offers several Campus CI plans provided by existing CC* program recipients as examples. Proposals addressing a multi-institution or regional activity and approach to coordinated and integrated CI may submit a Campus CI plan representing the multi-institution group or region.
All proposals submitted to CC* will be evaluated on how well they address cybersecurity issues and challenges relevant to their proposed activities. Depending on the type of proposal, these issues may include, but are not limited to data integrity, privacy, network security measures, federated access and identity management, and infrastructure monitoring. As a campus CI program, funded activities should represent ongoing opportunities for student engagement, education, and training. Proposals that demonstrate opportunities to engage students directly in the design, deployment, operation, and advancement of the funded CI activities, consistent with the required Campus CI plan, are encouraged.
All CC* projects will be reviewed with careful attention to the following:
- The extent to which the work provides a needed capability required by science, engineering and education.
- The expected impact on the deployed environment described in the proposal, and potential impact across a broader segment of the NSF community.
- Where applicable, how resource access control, federated identity management, and other cybersecurity related issues and community best practices are addressed.
- Consulting costs, which will be evaluated consistent with the expertise and past experience in building and supporting community research and education cyberinfrastructure.
- A Cyberinfrastructure (CI) plan [except for area (5) as noted earlier]: To what extent is the planned cyberinfrastructure likely to enhance capacity for discovery, innovation, and education in science and engineering? How well does the plan as presented position the proposing institution(s) for future cyberinfrastructure development? How well does the cyberinfrastructure plan support and integrate with the institutions' science and technology plan? Are IPv6 deployment and InCommon Federation addressed? Are the activities described in the proposal consistent with the institution's cyberinfrastructure plan?
History of Funding
Recently funded projects through this program can be found at https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/advancedSearchResult?ProgEleCode=1640,7726,8080&BooleanElement=Any&BooleanRef=Any&ActiveAwards=true&#results.
Additional Information
The CC* program welcomes proposals in five program areas at two levels of funding in most areas (Campus/Small or Region/Large):
Area 1: Data-Driven Networking Infrastructure for the Campus or Region
Proposals submitted to this area address network infrastructure improvements to enable national and global high-performance end-to-end access to dynamic network services that in turn enable rapid, unimpeded movement of diverse and distributed scientific data sets and advanced computing. Proposals may target either the Campus or the Region. Proposals in this area should focus on supporting their institutions' science research and education needs and aspirations and discuss how these needs and aspirations translate to the need for greater connectedness and investment in network capacity. Access to research and education resources external to the campus, including cloud computing resources, is also within scope.
Campus networking improvements include, but are not limited to, the following types of activities:
- Network upgrades within a campus network to support a wide range of science data-flows (including large files, distributed data, sensor networks, real-time data sources, and virtualized instruments for computer systems research");
- Re-architecting a campus network to support large science data flows, for example, by designing and building a Science DMZ (see http://fasterdata.es.net/science-dmz/ for more information on the Science DMZ approach); and/or
- A network connection upgrade for the campus connection to a regional optical exchange or point-of-presence that connects to a state/regional/national network aggregation point prioritizing support for research and education.
Proposals for the Region networking improvements include the same types of activities for a single campus expanded to span multiple small and under-resourced campuses. These proposals should address multiple campuses and their science driven data networking needs and also:
- increase research and education (R&E) network connectivity across smaller institutions coordinated and led by a Regional Optical Network (RON) or a leadership institution in R&E networking in the region.
- may be led by established regional and state R&E data networks and data network-based consortia. Example entities are listed as members of the national regional networks consortium called the Quilt (see https://www.thequilt.net/about-us/the-quilt-participants/). For areas of the US without a state or regional level coordinating entity and associated structure and network infrastructure, proposals will be accepted from self-declared leadership universities. An institution may also lead a proposal in regions with an established RON with documented coordination with the RON.
- are required to address campus networking needs spanning multiple under-resourced institutions. Proposals addressing a single institution that are submitted as proposals for the Region will be returned without review. Proposals may choose to apply an alternative design framework to the conventional single institution context in Area (1) and consider an aggregation model where some or all associated resources and services (e.g., Science DMZ) are centralized at a regional level.
- may include equipment and resources targeted for the state or regional network infrastructure. Such investments should be justified in the proposal in the context of needed improvements at the state and regional aggregation level in order to support the target institutions' external connectivity regionally, nationally, and globally for enabling R&E collaborations, as well as lack of alternate funding sources.
- should include the role of a Project Manager function with duties reflecting the coordination challenges of multi-institutional physical networking upgrades.
Area (2) Computing and the Computing Continuum for the Campus or Region
Local campus computing resources have emerged as an important aggregated and shared layer of scientific computing. This program area promotes coordinated approaches in scientific computing at the campus or regional level and invests in the seeding of new and shared computing resources through investments in capacity computing. The program area promotes a coordinated approach incentivizing multi-campus and national resource sharing as enabled by the OSG Consortium, an NSF-supported fabric of distributed scientific computing services that federate computing capacity across more than 150 institutions that delivered 2.6 billion CPU hours of scientific computing in calendar year 2023. NSF encourages campus-level proposals in this program area from under-resourced institutions and strong preference will be given to proposals demonstrating a compelling need for access to campus and distributed computing resources.
Campus proposals may request funding for the acquisition of a shared, high-performance network-connected compute resource available to scientific computing users on campus and outside of campus.
Proposals for the Region in this area include all of the guidance and requirements of campus-level proposals and expand the impact and usage of the compute resource on multiple small and under-resourced campuses identified in the proposal. Proposals for the Region:
- promote coordinated approaches in scientific computing resources serving scientific computing needs spanning a state's or region's small and under resourced institutions.
- are led by regional and state research and education leadership organizations.
- may request funding for the acquisition of a shared, high-performance network-connected compute resource available to scientific 9 computing users across a defined set of campuses.
- are required to address computing needs spanning multiple under-resourced institutions. A proposal focusing on a single campus but submitted as a proposal for the Region will be returned without review.
- fund computing resources primarily used by the targeted small and under resourced institutions.
Area (3) Network Integration and Applied Innovation
This program area supports end-to-end network CI through integration of existing and new technologies and applied innovation. The goal is to take advantage of research results, prototypes, and emerging innovations to use them to enable specified researchers in a networking context. Proposals in this area may leverage new and existing investments in network infrastructure, services, and tools by combining or extending capabilities to work as part of the CI environment used by scientific applications and users. Proposals in this area are expected to reflect innovation in advanced networking. As a result, this area is not appropriate for projects whose costs are dominated by equipment purchases. Proposals in this area support the development and integration of innovative networking capabilities and network-related software development, and deployment activities resulting in an operational environment prototype are expected to be part of the proposed activities. A broad range of activities is covered by this area, including but not limited to:
- Integration of networking protocols and technologies with science application layer processes and workflows, for instance, for large-scale shared scientific datasets and/or large-scale remote computational resources;
- Transition of successful research prototypes in Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and wireless networking technologies to distributed scientific environments and campus infrastructure;
- Applications of networking hardware and software developed on NSFFutureCloud facilities (e.g., ChameleonCloud and CloudLab), including the integration of new technologies such as programmable network interfaces;
- Networking solutions exploiting virtualization, distributed computing and Software-Defined Infrastructure (SDI), including cloud services and direct campus-to-cloud connections;
- Innovative research prototypes integrating programmable packet processing components into campus infrastructure or exploring applications of software-defined data planes in support of high-performance data distribution; and
- Network engineering support through the creation and application of new and novel procedures and tools and network measurement and monitoring software for solving end-to-end network performance issues, especially for dynamically constructed network services.
Area (4) Data Storage and Digital Archives for the Campus or Region
A significant challenge, if not bottleneck, to CI-enabled research and education is the limited access to data storage and associated services across campuses. While cloud services continue to provide data services for parts of the research community, data restrictions on some datasets often combined with expensive egress data movement charges do not allow this to be a complete solution. Meanwhile, the ability of research projects across disciplines to gather ever more data and increased tools to analyze data puts increasing pressure on storage and management. This program area promotes coordinated approaches in scientific storage, data management, and digital archives and incentivizes multi-campus and national resource sharing. Awards in this area reflect NSF principles and guidance in the community's stewardship of data from NSF funded research, and particularly aim at supporting the data lifecycle. As described below for the Data Management Plan, proposals should adhere to the findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR) principles and guidance from NSF described in the Dear Colleague Letter (DCL) on Effective Practices for Data: https://www.nsf.gov/publications/pub_summ.jsp?ods_key=nsf19069.
Storage proposals for the Campus address campus-wide storage needs in the proposal. A proposal focusing on a single science domain or project use will not be considered for funding.
Storage proposals for the Region adopt all the requirements and guidance of a campus storage proposal and target the research and education data needs spanning multiple small and under-resourced institutions in a region.
All Area (4) proposals should address:
- Scientific and engineering projects and their research and education storage needs, describing project-specific scenarios for scientific data generation, storage, and
- Features, capabilities, and details of the software platforms representing the proposed storage resources and services; and
- Plans to manage the resource, datasets, and usage while ensuring adherence to FAIR principles and equitable access.
Area (5) Strategy Awards for the Campus or the Region
For institutions, groups of institutions, and other entities, the task of assembling a complete CC* proposal can be a daunting challenge. CC* PI teams may require planning and effort related to their proposal ideas, for example, for compiling and understanding the science environments, applications and drivers motivating the proposed CI investments. Strategy Awards support PIs and teams requiring resources and time to coordinate and develop an approach to CC*-related activities. Proposals in this area will be reviewed and evaluated the same as other CC* proposals. Strategy proposals should define a clear set of goals and a set of coordination and planning activities to meet those goals. Equipment costs are not allowed as part of a Strategy award, and proposed costs should include support for community coordination and planning activities. Strategy proposals are welcome for areas (1), (2), and (4) in CC*.
Strategy awards for the Campus are limited to $100,000 for 1 year.
Strategy awards for the Region provide opportunities to foster new collaborations, including international partnerships, and address interdisciplinary topics. Innovative ideas for implementing novel networking strategies, collaborative technologies, training, broadening participation, and development of community standards for data and meta-data are especially encouraged. A Strategy proposal for the Region should develop a comprehensive CI strategy encompassing a campus, multiple campuses, or a state or regional research and education network entity. The regional strategy activity may encompass planning for a future CC* proposal, but goes beyond a specific campus network design, assessment of campus computing needs, or compilation of demanding science drivers to address integrated CI planning and scoping across the relevant scientific communities on campus, across multiple campuses, state-wide, or regionally. Strategy awards for the Region are limited to $200,000 for 2 years.