CFP: http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2011/nsf11539/nsf11539.htm
Deadline: July 18, 2011
Awards: 40-50 awards from $30M total estimated funding
Computation is accepted as the third pillar supporting innovation and discovery in science and engineering and is central to NSF’s vision of a Cyberinfrastructure Framework for 21st Century Science and Engineering (CIF21) as described in http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2010/nsf10015/nsf10015.jsp).
Software is an integral enabler of computation, experiment and theory and a primary modality for realizing the CIF21 vision. Scientific discovery and innovation are advancing along fundamentally new pathways opened by development of increasingly sophisticated software. Software is also directly responsible for increased scientific productivity and significant enhancement of researchers’ capabilities. In order to nurture, accelerate and sustain this critical mode of scientific progress, NSF has established the Software Infrastructure for Sustained Innovation (SI2) program, with the overarching goal of transforming innovations in research and education into sustained software resources that are an integral part of the cyberinfrastructure. SI2 is a long-term investment focused on catalyzing new thinking, paradigms, and practices in developing and using software to understand natural, human, and engineered systems. SI2‘s intent is to foster a pervasive cyberinfrastructure to help researchers address problems of unprecedented scale, complexity, resolution, and accuracy by integrating computation, data, networking, observations and experiments in novel ways. It is NSF’s expectation that SI2 investment will result in robust, reliable, usable and sustainable software infrastructure that is critical to achieving the CIF21 vision and will transform science and engineering while contributing to the education of next generation researchers and creators of future cyberinfrastructure. Education at all levels will play an important role in integrating such a dynamic cyberinfrastructure into the fabric of how science and engineering is performed.
The SI2 program includes three classes of awards:
- Scientific Software Elements (SSE): SSE awards target small groups that will create and deploy robust software elements for which there is a demonstrated need that will advance one or more significant areas of science and engineering.
- Scientific Software Integration (SSI): SSI awards target larger, interdisciplinary teams organized around the development and application of common software infrastructure aimed at solving common research problems. SSI awards will result in a sustainable community software framework serving a diverse community.
- Scientific Software Innovation Institutes (S2I2): S2I2 awards will focus on the establishment of long-term hubs of excellence in software infrastructure and technologies, which will serve a research community of substantial size and disciplinary breadth.
