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Date: 06/27/12

Through its Cyberinfrastructure Framework for 21^st Century Science and Engineering investments, the National Science Foundation seeks to leverage funds for developing integrated, scalable, and secure cyberinfrastructure serving multiple scientific disciplines. At the same time, many of NSF's Multi-User Research Facilities are currently developing or operating state-of-the-art cyberinfrastructure to serve the needs of increasingly computationally complex and data-intensive science.

This Dear Colleague Letter is to inform the NSF Research Facilities community of NSF's interest in fostering further coordination and integration among multi-user facilities in the planning, development, implementation, and utilization of cyberinfrastructure and to announce the availability of supplemental funds to incentivize these activities.

Proposed coordination and integration activities in the cyberinfrastructure domain should support the established scientific and/or educational goals of the partnering facilities, and can pertain to any area of cyberinfrastructure, such as but not limited to, common network design and related principles including security; collective software development, reuse, and deployment across facilities; more effective use of existing national cyberinfrastructure investments; establishing buying consortia for network, storage or visualization capacity; integrating databases; establishing common data protocols, management approaches, and/or user interfaces and portals; providing common identity management and authorization consistent with existing national cyberinfrastructure; adoption of common usage tracking approaches, metrics and software assurance approaches; coordination on activities relating to the integration of multi-user facilities with education. Proposed activities should enhance shared access to scientific resources and knowledge across federally funded scientific facilities as well as the broader scientific community. Supplemental funding requests should involve two or more NSF facilities, or an NSF facility together with facilities funded by other federal agencies (e.g. NASA, NIH, DOE). Supplemental funding requests will be evaluated based on the level of innovation, both in the domain of coordination (software, data, networks, etc.), and in the mechanisms through which coordination will occur, as well as the potential value of the coordination to the proposing facilities and to other facilities.

PI Eligibility: Grantees of multi-user facilities awards (limited here to awards of at least $6 million and a time duration of 3 or more years)

Anticipated type of award: Supplement to existing award

Supplement Preparation and Submission instructions: One proposal should be submitted on behalf of all partners with funding for partners made via sub-awards. Proposers are encouraged to discuss their proposed plans with their NSF program manager(s). The supplement request should include a summary of the proposed work; an explanation of its value; a justification of the need for the supplemental funds; a management plan explaining the role of each partner; and a budget, indicating the requested supplementary amounts.

Supplemental funding requests must be submitted by 5:00 pm, submitter's local time, Friday, July 20th, 2012 via the NSF FastLane system.

Anticipated funding amount and Estimated Number of Awards: Up to five supplements of up to $200,000 each.

Marc Rigas
Staff Associate, Office of Cyberinfrastructure (OCI)
(703) 292-2574