Computing in the Cloud  (CiC)    

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PROGRAM GUIDELINES

Solicitation  10-550

Important Notice to Proposers

A revised version of the NSF Proposal & Award Policies & Procedures Guide (PAPPG), NSF 13-1, was issued on October 4, 2012 and is effective for proposals submitted, or due, on or after January 14, 2013. Please be advised that, depending on the specified due date, the guidelines contained in NSF 13-1 may apply to proposals submitted in response to this funding opportunity.

Please be aware that significant changes have been made to the PAPPG to implement revised merit review criteria based on the National Science Board (NSB) report, National Science Foundation's Merit Review Criteria: Review and Revisions. While the two merit review criteria remain unchanged (Intellectual Merit and Broader Impacts), guidance has been provided to clarify and improve the function of the criteria. Changes will affect the project summary and project description sections of proposals. Annual and final reports also will be affected.

A by-chapter summary of this and other significant changes is provided at the beginning of both the Grant Proposal Guide and the Award & Administration Guide.

DUE DATES

Archived

SYNOPSIS

Cloud services represent a growing paradigm of on-demand access (as a service) to computing, data and software utilities, an abstraction of unlimited resources, and a usage-based billing model where users essentially "rent" virtual resources and pay for what they use. Underlying these cloud (infrastructure, platform, data, software, etc.) services are consolidated and virtualized data centers that provide virtual machine (VM) containers hosting computation and applications from a large numbers of distributed users. It is anticipated that cloud platforms and services will increasingly play a critical role in academic, government and industry sectors, and will thus have widespread societal impact.

NSF's goal is to provide the science and engineering communities with the opportunity to leverage highly-scalable cloud computing platforms to conduct research and education activities in cloud computing and data-intensive computing, and their applications. This solicitation specifically focuses on the use of Microsoft's Windows Azure platform as a complement to the computational platforms that NSF has made available to the research community to date. 

While the main focus of the Computing in the Cloud (CiC) program is to stimulate basic and applied research in cloud computing through the Microsoft Azure platform, the potential to foster simultaneous advances in other fields of science and engineering is both recognized and encouraged.

CiC proposals may be submitted in response to this solicitation, or as supplements to existing awards, or as EAGER proposals, as described later in this solicitation.

What Has Been Funded (Recent Awards Made Through This Program, with Abstracts)

Map of Recent Awards Made Through This Program