High Performance System Acquisition Building a More Inclusive Computing Environment for Science and Engineering | Apply Online

Opportunity Summary:

This NSF grant opportunity (Funding Opportunity 13-528), titled "High Performance System Acquisition: Building a More Inclusive Computing Environment for Science and Engineering," is aimed at expanding the nations shared, NSF-supported advanced computing and data infrastructure so that a broader range of researchers can use it effectively. It sits under NSFs Advanced Computing Infrastructure (ACI) vision within CIF21 (Cyberinfrastructure for 21st Century Science and Engineering). The core idea is that modern science and engineering increasingly depends on advanced computation and data-driven methods, and NSF wants national-scale capabilities that go beyond what most campuses can provide, while also reaching communities that have not traditionally used high-end supercomputing.

The solicitation builds on NSFs existing two-tier national cyberinfrastructure model, including the very large flagship capabilities (such as Blue Waters) and the eXtreme Digital (XD) program tier that provides widely shared national resources and services. Systems funded through this call are intended to be integrated into and allocated as part of the XD national shared resource portfolio. The XD ecosystem at the time included XSEDE (the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment) for integration and user-facing coordination, along with supporting services like a Technical Insertion Service (to evaluate and recommend new software/technologies for the environment), a Technical Audit Service (to provide metrics and operate XDMoD for monitoring and reporting), and national visualization resources (for example, Longhorn at TACC and RDAV at NICS/University of Tennessee). In other words, NSF is not just buying hardware; it is strengthening a federated, service-oriented national platform where new systems must fit operationally and programmatically.

NSF describes two main thrusts for the kinds of innovative proposals it wants. The first thrust is about complementing prior high-performance computing investments by making high-end capabilities useful to a larger and more diverse set of scientific and engineering communities. Historically, many national acquisitions emphasized petascale, tightly coupled workloads dominated by floating-point performance. NSF is signaling that, while those users still matter, the frontier is broader now: complex, dynamic workflows; heterogeneous and diverse computing architectures; and communities whose needs are not well served by classic, monolithic HPC systems. Competitive proposals under this thrust would help "position and support the entire spectrum of NSF funded communities," including multidisciplinary and data-enabled research areas that may not identify as traditional HPC users but still need serious national-scale computing.

The second thrust responds to the growing pressure to store, move, secure, and analyze massive volumes of data coming from both simulation and experimental or observational sources (telescopes, genome repositories, sensors, scanners, satellites, and many others). NSF points to the broader "data deluge" problem: data are heterogeneous, come in many formats, span structured and unstructured sources, and are used across disciplines. A key requirement is that data be rapidly accessible to geographically distributed researchers and handled securely. To address this, the solicitation calls for acquisition and support of a large-scale data-capable instrument or environment that can store data, provide sustainable access, support analysis and dissemination, enforce security, and enable data migration across NSF cyberinfrastructure. NSF also clarifies a boundary: the program is not primarily about very long-term archival storage, though proposals that include use cases that could inform future archival policy are welcome.

Proposals are expected from organizations willing to act as national "Service Providers" within the XD program. These organizations would acquire, deploy, and operate the new resources using the shared-services model associated with XSEDE, meaning the resulting capabilities must be delivered in a way that works for a broad national user community rather than a single local campus. The solicitation also notes that adding innovative new features to already-deployed systems can be eligible, as long as the work aligns with the program goals and expands capability in meaningful ways.

NSF provides a set of example capability targets that competitive proposals might address, and they highlight the program's inclusive and workflow-and-data-aware direction. Examples include adding new types of computational resources tuned for less traditional computational science communities; providing reliable services that support complex and dynamic workflows that are hard to achieve in the existing XD environment; easing the transition from local to national computing using virtual machines; bringing in usable and cost-efficient cloud computing capabilities at national scale; extending support for data-intensive and computationally challenging applications; delivering high-throughput computing approaches for communities that need many tasks executed efficiently; offering interactive environments for users who need responsive computing for code development, debugging at the hundreds-of-cores level, or workflow/gateway responsiveness; and supporting scientific applications that need on the order of a few hundred to a few thousand cores (as opposed to only the largest tightly coupled jobs). NSF also emphasizes operational readiness, with an expectation that funded systems provide a high degree of stability and usability by January 2015, underscoring that these are intended to be production, user-serving national resources.

On performance validation, NSF makes an important change from some previous acquisition competitions. Earlier solicitations often required both NSF-provided benchmarks and proposer-selected benchmarks. Here, NSF does not mandate a single standard benchmark suite, largely because the solicitation is not limited to one classic large, tightly coupled floating-point-centric supercomputer design. Instead, proposers must present convincing, data-driven evidence that their system will perform as claimed for its intended communities and use cases. Benchmarking and evaluation should therefore be aligned with the proposed resource's purpose, demonstrating not only raw performance where relevant but also the broader scientific diversity and usability benefits enabled by the proposed innovations.

In terms of funding details, NSF anticipated about three awards with an estimated total funding level of $30,000,000. There is no cost-sharing requirement indicated. The opportunity was posted December 26, 2012, with a full proposal deadline of April 15, 2013, and an archive date of May 15, 2013. Eligible applicants are limited to U.S. institutions of higher education and Federally Funded Research and Development Centers (FFRDCs) applying as Service Providers, with an explicit requirement that systems deployed (including those at FFRDC sites) provide open access to researchers across the broad range of NSF-supported science and engineering fields. Overall, the program is best understood as an effort to widen who can benefit from national-scale advanced computing, while modernizing the national platform to better handle data-intensive science, complex workflows, interactive and cloud-like use models, and secure, distributed access to large datasets.

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