Training-based Workforce Development for Advanced Cyberinfrastructure

This program seeks to prepare, nurture, and grow the national scientific research workforce for creating, utilizing, and supporting advanced cyberinfrastructure (CI) to enable and potentially transform fundamental science and engineering research and contribute to the Nation's overall economic competitiveness and security. The goals of this solicitation are to (i) ensure broad adoption of CI tools, methods, and resources by the research community in order to catalyze major research advances and to enhance researchers’ abilities to lead the development of new CI; and (ii) integrate core literacy and discipline-appropriate advanced skills in advanced CI as well as computational and data-driven science and engineering into the Nation’s educational curriculum/instructional material fabric spanning undergraduate and graduate courses for advancing fundamental research. Pilot and Implementation projects may target one or both of the solicitation goals, while Large-scale Project Conceptualization projects must address both goals. For the purpose of this solicitation, advanced CI is broadly defined as the set of resources, tools, methods, and services for advanced computation, large-scale data handling and analytics, and networking and security for large-scale systems that collectively enable potentially transformative fundamental research.

This solicitation calls for innovative, scalable training, education, and curriculum/instructional materials—targeting one or both of the solicitation goals—to address the emerging needs and unresolved bottlenecks in scientific and engineering research workforce development, from the postsecondary level to active researchers. The funded activities, spanning targeted, multidisciplinary communities, will lead to transformative changes in the state of research workforce preparedness for advanced CI-enabled research in the short- and long-terms. As part of this investment, this solicitation also seeks to broaden CI access and adoption by (i) increasing or deepening accessibility of methods and resources of advanced CI and of computational and data-driven science and engineering by a wide range of scientific disciplines and institutions with lower levels of CI adoption to date; and (ii) harnessing the capabilities of larger segments of diverse underrepresented groups. Proposals from, and in partnership with, the aforementioned communities are especially encouraged.

There are three project classes as defined below:

• Pilot Projects: up to $300,000 total budget with durations up to two years;
• Implementation Projects: Small (with total budgets of up to $500,000) or Medium (with total budgets of up to $1,000,000) for durations of up to four years; and
• Large-scale Project Conceptualization Projects: up to $500,000 total budgets with durations up to 2 years.

Section II. Program Description provides a more complete description of the project classes. Section V.A. Proposal Preparation Instructions describes the proposal elements required for the various project classes in order to address the suitable set of solicitation-specific review criteria.

The CyberTraining program is led by the Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure (OAC) in the Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) and has participation from several directorates and divisions as described in Section II. Program Description, Programmatic Areas of Interest. Not all directorates/divisions are participating at the same level and some have specific research and education priorities. The appropriate contact for the CyberTraining program in any directorate/division is the Cognizant Program Officer (PO) for the respective directorate/division/office/program listed.

All projects are expected to clearly articulate how they address important community needs and will provide resources that will be widely available to and usable by the research community. Prospective principal investigators (PIs) are strongly encouraged to contact the Cognizant Program Officers in CISE/OAC and in the participating directorate/division relevant to the proposal to ascertain whether the focus and budget of their proposed activities are appropriate for this solicitation. Such consultations should be completed at least one month in advance of the submission deadline. PIs should include the names of the Cognizant Program Officers consulted in a Single Copy Document as described in Section V.A. Proposal Preparation Instructions. The intent of the CyberTraining program is to stimulate co-funding between OAC and one or more “domain” directorates/divisions. (For this purpose, units of CISE other than OAC are considered “domain” divisions.) To ensure relevance to community needs and to facilitate adoption, those proposals of interest to one or more domain divisions must include at least one PI/co-PI with expertise relevant to the targeted research discipline. All proposals shall include at least one PI/co-PI with expertise relevant to OAC.

Prospective PIs contemplating submissions that primarily target communities relevant to directorates/divisions that are not participating in this solicitation are directed to instead explore the education and workforce development programs of the respective directorates/divisions.