CCStarSalientPoints

Local campus computing resources have emerged as an important aggregated and shared layer of scientific computing, as evidenced by the growth in the Open Science Grid (OSG), an NSF-supported distributed scientific computing fabric of shared computing clusters across more than 100 institutions that delivered 2.4 billion CPU hours of scientific computing in calendar year 2019. In 2020, NSF made a new five-year award to continue and enhance OSG under the Partnership to Advance Throughput Computing (PATh) project.

This program area promotes coordinated approaches in scientific computing at the campus level and invests in the seeding of new and shared computing resources at the campus level through investments in capacity computing in campus clusters. The program area promotes a coordinated approach incentivizing multi-campus and national resource sharing.

It is expected that the campus-wide computing 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 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 expected to run on the resources.

All proposals should consider expected outcomes and explain the compelling need for proposed computing resource in light of the current state of available computing resources and the expected enabling benefits of the proposed resources to the identified science drivers and applications.

NSF encourages 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/cloud resources, including institutions lacking necessary computing and storage resources on campus. Under-resourced institutions in need of technical direction/expertise during their proposal development are encouraged to engage the NSF-funded PATh project at: http://www.opensciencegrid.org

The proposal 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.