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. The program continues to emphasize integrated CI services, quantitative metrics with targets for delivery and usage of these services, and community creation.
The CSSI umbrella program anticipates three classes of awards:
- Elements: These awards target small groups that will create and deploy robust services for which there is a demonstrated need that will advance one or more significant areas of science and engineering.
- Framework Implementations: These awards target larger, interdisciplinary teams organized around the development and application of 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 Cyberinfrastructure (CI) services to a diverse community or communities.
- Transition to Sustainability: These awards target groups who would like to execute a well-defined sustainability plan for existing CI with demonstrated impact in one or more areas of science and engineering supported by NSF. The sustainability plan should enable new avenues of support for the long-term sustained impact of the CI. NOTE: If the proposal is an extension of a previous CSSI funded Frameworks project, the proposal should clearly justify the need for such an extension, instead of targeting the Transition to Sustainability award class. Projects funded via CSSI Elements and Frameworks awards, or its predecessor programs, is intended to be of finite duration, limited to no more than 10 years. If appropriate for transition to sustainability, teams may request further one-time support through the Transition to Sustainability” class of awards.
There is a need for scalable community-driven CI to support innovative scientific inquiry based on software and data that are findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable, provenance traceable, and sustainable. All projects must be designed to overcome significant bottlenecks to solving compelling S&E questions. Data CI may additionally combine the elements of algorithms, software, computation, networks, task automation or exploiting custom hardware to support data-centric approaches to S&E. Data may be derived from experimentation, observation, or computation, and may be diverse, consistent with S&E across all disciplines.
Proposers should consider how efforts for education and community development in software and data CI can be designed as part of the CI development. Proposals that, as part of the CI development or community engagement, include visitor support, postdoctoral opportunities, or short training courses that increase interactions of domain scientists and software and/or CI specialists are encouraged. Proposals that include innovative educational activities to train next-generation creators of CI, and to train the community at all levels on using CI in ways that broaden participation, are welcome. Educational and broadening participation activities should not, however, be the focus of the proposal, but integrated within the main effort of developing the CI. PIs wishing to submit projects that focus primarily on CI education and curriculum should submit to the Training-based Workforce Development for Advanced Cyberinfrastructure (CyberTraining) solicitation.
Previous awards can be seen at https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/advancedSearchResult?ProgEleCode=&BooleanElement=Any&BooleanRef=Any&ActiveAwards=true&#results
Prospective Principal Investigators (PIs) should be aware that this is a multi-directorate activity and that they are encouraged to submit proposals with broad, interdisciplinary interests. Further, not all divisions are participating at the same level and division-specific priorities differ. Thus, PIs interested in responding to this solicitation are encouraged to refer to core program descriptions, Dear Colleague Letters, and recently posted descriptions on directorate and divisional home pages to gain insight about the priorities for the relevant areas of science and engineering to which their proposals may be responsive. Prospective PIs should also refer to the directorate/division-specific descriptions contained in Section II of this solicitation.