High Performance System Acquisition Enhancing the Petascale Computing Environment for Science and Engineering | Apply Online

Opportunity Summary:

The National Science Foundation (NSF) funding opportunity titled "High Performance System Acquisition: Enhancing the Petascale Computing Environment for Science and Engineering" is a large, targeted investment meant to expand the nation s shared high end computing capacity for open research. The core idea is to strengthen NSF s 21st century cyberinfrastructure vision by acquiring and deploying a new, innovative petascale high performance computing (HPC) system that supports sustained, real world scientific and engineering workloads, especially those that are data intensive, memory demanding, and difficult to run at scale. This solicitation sits in the context of NSF s earlier HPC investments delivered through TeraGrid, and it explicitly positions the new award within Extreme Digital (XD), the program described as TeraGrid s successor. In practical terms, NSF is looking for a capable organization to purchase, install, and operate a major HPC resource that becomes part of a national ecosystem researchers can rely on, not just a one off machine on a single campus.

A central feature of the opportunity is the role of the "HPC Resource Provider." NSF is not simply buying equipment; it is supporting an institution (or center) that can run the system as a service to the broader science and engineering community. That means proposals need to go beyond hardware specifications and demonstrate operational maturity: staffing, user support, software environment, policies, allocation mechanisms, reliability practices, and an ability to integrate with XD services. The solicitation emphasizes that these providers are essential to national cyberinfrastructure because they bridge the gap between raw computational capability and the actual needs of researchers who must run large scale simulations, analyze massive datasets, and move code and workflows from local campus clusters to national systems.

The competitive goals NSF lays out make clear what "success" should look like. The proposed petascale system should expand the range of computationally challenging and data intensive applications that can be addressed through XD, meaning it should enable research that is currently limited by compute throughput, memory capacity, I O performance, interconnect speed, or a combination of those factors. NSF also expects the system to introduce a major new innovative capability component to the community. While the solicitation does not define innovation as a single technology, the intent is that the acquisition should push forward what users can do, whether through architectural advances, novel memory or storage approaches, improved data intensive workflows, or service models that make large scale computing more accessible and productive. Another explicit requirement is that the system provide an effective migration path for researchers whose data and code are outgrowing campus level resources; the system should help users scale up without hitting barriers caused by software fragility, usability gaps, or unsupported workflows.

Operational expectations are just as important as peak performance. NSF calls for reliable, robust system software and services that are essential to achieving strong sustained performance on real applications. This reflects a common reality in HPC: theoretical peak flops do not matter much if schedulers, compilers, libraries, parallel file systems, and monitoring tools are unstable or poorly integrated. The solicitation sets a concrete readiness target as well, stating the system should efficiently provide a high degree of stability and usability by January 2013. In other words, NSF wants a resource that becomes productive on a predictable timeline, with an emphasis on delivering a dependable user experience rather than a long experimental ramp up.

System selection is heavily benchmark driven, and the solicitation makes benchmarking a key evaluation factor. Proposers must run two categories of benchmarks: NSF provided benchmarks and proposer selected benchmarks. The NSF provided benchmark suite (referenced as being posted on an NSF website and identified as NSF 0605) is meant to capture the most demanding characteristics of the kinds of science and engineering applications NSF expects will stress the system, such as heavy memory use, high communication requirements, large dataset handling, and sustained throughput on realistic workloads. In addition, proposers must include their own benchmarks, which should specifically highlight the innovative aspects of the proposed system or service approach. This structure gives NSF a common yardstick across proposals while still allowing each proposer to make a performance case tailored to what is new or distinctive in their design.

On the administrative side, this is a discretionary funding opportunity from NSF s Office of Cyberinfrastructure, using a Cooperative Agreement as the funding instrument. That typically signals a more involved relationship between NSF and the awardee than a standard grant, often including substantial NSF oversight or collaboration during deployment and operations. The opportunity anticipated a single award, with an estimated total funding amount of 30,000,000 and an award floor of 30,000,000, indicating one large, focused investment rather than multiple smaller awards. The solicitation also required cost sharing or matching, so applicants would need to bring some level of institutional or partner commitment to the table in addition to NSF funds.

Eligibility is limited to U S institutions of higher education and Federally Funded Research and Development Centers (FFRDCs) applying as Resource Providers. NSF notes that FFRDCs may be uniquely positioned to contribute to an academic facing HPC environment, and it is open to deploying systems at FFRDC sites. However, a non negotiable condition is open access: the proposing organization must ensure that the system will be available to researchers across the broad range of NSF supported science and engineering fields, not restricted to a narrow local user group. The timeline information included in the listing shows the opportunity was posted December 10, 2010 with a full proposal deadline of March 7, 2011.

Taken together, the opportunity is best understood as a national scale acquisition and operations commitment aimed at strengthening open, shared petascale computing in the United States. NSF is asking for a provider that can deliver a technically strong system, prove its value through rigorous benchmarking, integrate it into the XD ecosystem, and operate it as a stable, usable, community facing capability on a defined schedule, with real attention to the end to end experience researchers need to successfully run demanding codes and data driven workflows.

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