CFDA#
47.070; 47.083
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Funder Type
Federal Government
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IT Classification
A - Primarily intended to fund technology
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Authority
National Science Foundation (NSF)
Summary
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 CI is explicitly addressed in the program. Science-driven requirements are the primary motivation for any proposed activity. All projects supported by the CC* program must be driven by STEM research and education needs that require the support of networking, computing, and storage infrastructure on campuses.
A common theme across all aspects of the CC* program is the critical importance of the partnership among campus-level CI experts, including the campus Information Technology (IT)/networking/data organization, contributing domain scientists, research groups, and educators necessary to engage in, and drive, new campus CI capabilities and approaches in support of scientific discovery. Proposals across the program should reflect and demonstrate this partnership on campus. Proposals will be evaluated on the strength of institutional partnerships, as they are expected to play a central role in developing and implementing the eventual network and data infrastructure upgrades. Campus IT leadership involvement is a critical element in CC*.
For FY 23, CC* will support projects within the following 7 program areas:
- Area 1: Data-Driven Networking Infrastructure for the Campus and Researcher;
- Area 2: Regional Connectivity for Small Institutions of Higher Education;
- Area 3: Network Integration and Applied Innovation;
- Area 4: Campus Computing and the Computing Continuum;
- Area 5: Regional Computing;
- Area 6: Data Storage; and
- Area 7: Planning Grants and CI-Research Alignment
All proposals submitted to the CC* program, with the exception of submissions in response to program area (7), 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. The website, http://fasterdata.es.net/campusCIplanning/, offers a number of Campus CI plans provided by existing CC* program awardees 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* are expected to address the relevant cybersecurity issues and challenges related 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 deployment, operation, and advancement of the CI funded activities, consistent with the required Campus CI plan, are encouraged. Note that NSF encourages Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) supplement proposals on active awards as well.
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.
- A Project Plan addressing clear goals and milestones resulting in a working system in the target environment.
- Tangible metrics to measure the success of the system.
- Where applicable, how resource access control, federated identity management, and other cybersecurity-related issues and community best practices are addressed.
- For proposals in area 4 or 6, the extent to which science drivers and applications motivate the types of compute or storage resources requested.
- A Cyberinfrastructure (CI) plan [except for area 7]: 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 seven program areas:
Area 1: Data-Driven Networking Infrastructure for the Campus and Researcher
Proposals submitted to this area address network infrastructure improvements at the campus level 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. These 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 are required to include a network diagram of the proposed network upgrades. Proposals missing a network diagram in the Project Description will be returned without review. Please refer to the application guide for more requirements.
Area 2: Regional Connectivity for Small Institutions of Higher Education
This area supports broadening participation and significantly widening the set of institutions connected to the regional and national research and education network fabric. This area specifically targets groups of smaller institutions with fundamental challenges in networking infrastructure and resources. This area supports increased 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.
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 Regional Optical Network (RON) with documented coordination.
Proposals submitted to this area must address scientific research and education needs driving the proposed improvements in R&E networking connectivity on campus and/or externally.
NOTE: Proposals focusing on a single campus, a single science domain, or a single project use will not be considered for funding. Proposals are required to address campus networking needs spanning multiple under-resourced institutions.
Area 3: Network Integration and Applied Innovation
This program area supports end-to-end network CI through the 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 should support the development and integration of innovative networking capabilities and network-related software development, and deployment activities that result in an operational environment prototype. 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.
Additionally, proposals are encouraged to perform experimental deployment, protocol prototyping and testing, and evaluation using FABRIC (https://www.fabric-testbed.net).
Area 4: Campus Computing and the Computing Continuum
This program area promotes coordinated approaches in scientific computing at the campus level and invests in the seeding of new and shared computing resources across campus through investments in capacity computing clusters. The program area promotes a coordinated approach incentivizing multi-campus and national resource sharing.
All proposals submitted to this area must address:
- Scientific and engineering projects and their research and education computing needs, describing project-specific scenarios for scientific computing tied to the proposed computing resources;
- Features, capabilities, and software platforms representing the proposed computing resources; and
- Scientific computing codes are expected to run on the resources.
The proposal may request funding for the acquisition of a shared, high-performance network-connected computing resource available to scientific computing users on campus and outside of campus. Additionally, proposals are encouraged to consider open-source virtualization technologies. Proposals are required to commit to a minimum of 20% shared time on the cluster and describe their approach to making the cluster available as a shared resource external to the campus, with access and authorization according to local administrative policy.
Area 5: Regional Computing-
The program area promotes coordinated approaches in scientific computing at the regional level through investments in computing clusters serving scientific computing needs that span a state's or region's small and under-resourced institutions. This area solicits proposals led by regional and state research and education leadership entities and universities. This area represents an opportunity as well for potential collaborations between EPSCoR and non-EPSCoR jurisdictions.
All proposals submitted to this area must address:
- Scientific and engineering projects and their research and education computing needs, describing project-specific scenarios for scientific computing tied to the proposed computing resources;
- Features, capabilities, and software platforms representing the proposed computing resources;
- Scientific computing codes expected to run on the resources; and
- Approaches/mechanisms that will be used to ensure fair and equitable use of the resources by the targeted small and under-resourced institutions.
Proposals are required to commit to a minimum of 20% shared time on the cluster and describe their approach to making the cluster available as a shared resource external to the state/region and the set of institutions that are primarily being served. Proposals are strongly encouraged to address this requirement by joining the Partnerships to Advance Throughput Computing (PATh) campus federation (https://path-cc.io) and adopting an appropriate subset of PATh services to make the clusters available to researchers on a national scale.
NOTE: Proposals focusing on a single campus, a single science domain, or a single project use will not be considered for funding. Proposals are required to address campus networking needs spanning multiple under-resourced institutions.
Area 6: Data Storage:
This program area promotes coordinated approaches in scientific storage and data management at the campus level and incentivizes multi-campus and national resource sharing. This program area supports campus data storage needs for scientific data. It is expected that campus-wide storage needs are addressed in the proposal; a proposal focusing on a single science domain or project use will not be considered for funding. All proposals in this program area must address:
- Scientific and engineering projects and their research and education storage needs, describing project-specific scenarios for scientific data generation, storage, and management;
- Features, capabilities, and software platforms representing the proposed storage resources and services; and
- Plans to manage the resource, data sets, and usage while ensuring adherence to FAIR principles and equitable access.
All proposals should consider expected outcomes and explain the compelling need for proposed storage capacity and capability in light of the current state of available storage resources and the expected enabling benefits of the proposed resources to the identified science drivers and applications. No software license fees are allowed. Proposals are expected to describe full open-source-based configurations and solutions. Under-resourced institutions may opt-out of this requirement, and may include commercial software license costs for the data storage management platform only - such proposals are expected to provide clear evidence of institutional commitment to supporting those costs beyond the two-year award duration.
Specific to program areas 4, 5, and 6: High-Performance Network Connectivity and Specification: Proposals must describe the network connectivity of the proposed computing resource, both intra-campus [for example, the campus network path(s) connecting the resource with the researchers and driving science applications on campus], and intercampus (for example, showing the network path connecting with the regional exchange point or Internet.
Area 7: Planning Grants and CI-Research Alignment
Supports Planning Grants for 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. Planning 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 Planning Grant, and proposed costs are expected to include support for community coordination and planning activities. Planning proposals are welcome for areas (1), (2), (4), (5) and (6) in CC* and are limited to $100,000 for 1 year.
This area also supports CI-Research Alignment (CIRA) activities. A CIRA award provides opportunities to foster new collaborations, including international partnerships, and address interdisciplinary topics. A CIRA proposal is expected to develop a comprehensive CI strategy encompassing a campus, multiple campuses, or a state or regional research and education network entity. The CIRA 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. CIRA proposals are limited to $200,000 for up to 2 years.
Note: that any wireless solution (for example, multi-gigabit or environment-constrained technologies to connect campuses in rural areas, or existing campus networks to new instrumentation, resources, or communities) proposed should address research and education needs as the singular priority, as opposed to a general campus wireless network.