Software Infrastructure for Sustained Innovation S2I2 | Apply Online

Opportunity Summary:

The National Science Foundation (NSF) opportunity titled Software Infrastructure for Sustained Innovation (S2I2) is a long-term investment aimed at strengthening the software foundations that modern research depends on. It is tied to NSF's broader Cyberinfrastructure Framework for 21st Century Science and Engineering (CIF21), which envisions a deeply connected national and global research environment linking high-performance computing, advanced networks, massive data stores, instruments and facilities, observatories, experiments, and sensor systems. The core idea behind S2I2 is that software is the main mechanism that makes this kind of cyberinfrastructure usable, scalable, and scientifically transformative. Because software sits everywhere in the stack, from scientific applications and workflows to libraries, middleware, operating systems, networking, and device drivers, NSF is emphasizing not just new features or prototypes, but robust, reliable, reusable, and sustainable software that can support scientific discovery over the long haul.

A central theme of the solicitation is that the research community is facing growing complexity and new constraints that software must explicitly address. These include disruptive hardware trends, rapid growth in data volume, requirements for data integrity and reproducibility, privacy and confidentiality concerns, strong security needs, increasingly complex application behavior, and system-level challenges such as fault tolerance and energy efficiency. NSF frames S2I2 as a way to catalyze new thinking and new practices around the full software lifecycle, meaning not only writing code, but also governance models, community engagement, verification and validation, documentation, testing, distribution, long-term maintenance, and the social and technical processes that keep software alive and trusted across many years and many user communities.

S2I2 as a whole includes three award classes that scale from small efforts to major hubs. Scientific Software Elements (SSE) awards support small teams building specific, needed software components that advance one or more research areas. Scientific Software Integration (SSI) awards support larger interdisciplinary teams that integrate software infrastructure into sustainable community frameworks used by broader groups. The solicitation text provided, however, is specifically focused on the largest category: Scientific Software Innovation Institutes (S2I2-SSI institutes). These institutes are meant to become long-term hubs of excellence that serve sizable, diverse research communities. NSF emphasizes that institute outcomes should go beyond delivering a piece of software; they should also establish the development processes, architectures, community support structures, and implementation mechanisms that reliably translate computational innovations into durable infrastructure. Institutes are expected to bring together multidisciplinary teams that include domain scientists and engineers, computer scientists and software engineers, technologists, and educators, with the aim of changing research practice and productivity through high-quality, sustained software.

Within the institute track, NSF distinguishes between two types of awards. Conceptualization Awards are planning awards focused on organizing a community, defining shared requirements, and mapping the scientific and software challenges that justify an institute. These proposals are expected to demonstrate the seriousness and readiness needed to eventually compete for an Implementation Award. Implementation Awards, in contrast, fund the actual creation and operation of an institute, but in this solicitation they are restricted to specific topics where NSF has already identified strong community need and has aligned budget resources from impacted NSF units. NSF also signals that future versions of the program may open different institute implementation topics as new community planning efforts mature.

The solicitation highlights the cross-NSF nature of S2I2, led by the Division of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure (CISE/ACI) in partnership with multiple directorates and offices. It also outlines particular areas of interest that may shape conceptualization proposals depending on the participating NSF unit. For example, CISE/ACI is especially interested in broad, crosscutting software-infrastructure issues like sustainability, lifecycle and ecosystem thinking, governance, verification and validation, and reproducibility. The Biological Sciences Directorate emphasizes high-priority problems that leverage existing NSF investments to transform BIO-related infrastructure. Several Mathematical and Physical Sciences (MPS) divisions note interests such as community-wide impact in astronomy, alignment with the Materials Genome Initiative in materials research, new mathematical and statistical theories and tools in mathematical sciences, and significant advances in fundamental physics. NSF strongly recommends that prospective principal investigators contact the relevant program officers to confirm fit, and it is explicit that proposals judged not relevant or not responsive can be returned without review. NSF also notes that conceptualization proposals must not duplicate areas already covered by current conceptualization awards; instead, teams interested in already-covered areas are encouraged to join ongoing activities.

For this specific solicitation cycle, institute Implementation Awards are limited to two defined topics. The first is the Chemical and Materials Research Software Institute (CMRSI), intended as a focal point for a sustainable, interoperable, verified, and accessible software ecosystem supporting computation and data-centric methods in chemical and materials research. NSF links this to major scientific and societal goals, including computational design of chemicals and materials from fundamental building blocks, predicting new synthesis pathways, advancing understanding of catalysis, studying systems far from equilibrium (including connections to biological systems and soft materials), enabling multiscale simulations of polymers and complex materials across time and length scales, and improving understanding of quantum dynamics in complex chemical and condensed-phase systems. CMRSI activities that support the Materials Genome Initiative are explicitly welcomed, signaling NSF's interest in accelerating discovery through integrated data, modeling, and software platforms.

The second implementation topic is the Science Gateways Software Institute (SGSI), which focuses on the software ecosystem for "science gateways" (also referred to as portals or hubs). NSF positions gateways as a practical way to broaden access to sophisticated cyberinfrastructure by providing user-friendly interfaces and unified access to computing resources (supercomputers and clouds), instruments (telescopes, sensor networks), data collections and collaborative environments, and software for simulation, modeling, analysis, and workflows. The institute concept here is not simply to create more gateways, but to strengthen the underlying gateway software ecosystem so gateways can be built, sustained, and evolved more efficiently and securely, and so they can support scalable, dynamic use of diverse infrastructure without requiring every research team to become experts in the technical details. NSF argues that gateways can reduce duplication by offering scalable solutions for entire classes of problems, rather than requiring thousands of separate installations, and they can make interdisciplinary collaboration more feasible by standardizing access and integrating complex components behind consistent interfaces.

On the administrative side, the opportunity is an NSF discretionary grant program (Funding Opportunity Number 15-553) in the science and technology research and development category. NSF anticipated around 8 awards under the overall opportunity listing, with an estimated total funding level of $13.5 million, an award floor of $500,000, and a listed ceiling up to $20 million. The solicitation indicates no cost sharing requirement. The opportunity is listed as accepting proposals anytime (an open submission window in the provided record). Eligible applicants include US-based universities and colleges, nonprofit non-academic organizations such as museums, observatories, research labs, and professional societies, for-profit US organizations (with encouragement especially for capable small businesses), and other federal agencies and Federally Funded Research and Development Centers (FFRDCs) with prior coordination with NSF. NSF encourages partnerships across academia, government labs, and industry, including international collaboration, but it also notes an important constraint: participation by for-profit entities (outside SBIR-eligible subaward participation) and international partners generally must be supported from non-NSF funding sources, so teams need to plan cost and role structures accordingly.

Taken together, S2I2 is essentially NSF's push to treat research software as a first-class component of national research infrastructure. The institute mechanism, in particular, is meant to create stable, community-centered organizations that can professionalize and sustain software that many researchers depend on, while also improving reliability, usability, interoperability, verification, reproducibility, and long-term stewardship. The program is explicitly designed to move beyond one-off project code toward shared infrastructure that can scale in both technical capability and community impact, ultimately accelerating discovery and improving productivity across science and engineering.

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