AGENCY: National Science Foundation (NSF)/ Office of the Director/ Office of Cyberinfrastructure OBJECTIVES: NSF is requesting proposals from organizations willing to serve as high performance computing (HPC) Resource Providers, and who propose to acquire and deploy new, innovative HPS systems. NSF's five-year goal for high performance computing (HPC) is to enable petascale science and engineering through the deployment and support of a world-class HPC environment comprising the most capable combination of HPC assets available to the academic community. By the year 2010, the petascale HPC environment will enable investigations of computationally challenging problems that require computing systems capable of delivering sustained performance approaching 1015 floating point operations per second (petaflops) on real applications, that consume large amounts of memory, and/or that work with very large data sets. Among other things, researchers will be able to perform simulations that are intrinsically multi-scale or that involve the simultaneous interaction of multiple processes. HPC Resource Providers - those organizations willing to acquire, deploy and operate HPC systems in service to the broad science and engineering research and education community - play a key role in the provision and support of a national HPC environment. Competitive HPC systems will: (1) expand the range of computationally-challenging science and engineering applications that researchers will be able to tackle with the TeraGrid HPC portfolio; (2) incorporate reliable, robust system software essential to optimal sustained performance; and (3) provide a high degree of stability and usability. For the purposes of this solicitation, an acquisition may include: computing hardware, including processors, caches (if present) and main memory, inter-connects, I/O sub-system(s); local on-line storage of sufficient size to support science and engineering research applications that use the full extent of the computing hardware; archival storage of a size appropriate to a system of the scale proposed; a wide-area network connection; any other hardware typical of a modern supercomputing system; system software including, one or more operating systems, one or more file systems, a set of compilers and run-time libraries, software libraries that support access to the full memory model of the system proposed including one that offers a standard MPI interface, standard operating system and mathematical libraries, debugging and program development tools, system administration and job scheduling software, user accounting software, any other software typical of a modern supercomputing system; either dedicated nodes or small satellite systems that provide for interactive access, job preparation and staging, system management and/or remote visualization. For this competition, NSF is interested in receiving proposals for the following types of systems: (A) a data-intensive, high-performance computing system, (b) an experimental high-performance computing system of innovative design, (C) an experimental, high-performance grid test-bed, and (D) a pool of loosely coupled grid-computing resources. ELIGIBILITY RESTRICTIONS: An organization may submit only one proposal but may be a sub-awardee on other proposals responding to this solicitation. Collaborative projects may only be submitted as a single proposal in which a single award is being requested. The involvement of partner organizations should be supported through sub-awards administered by the submitting organization. DEADLINE:
FUNDING INFORMATION: Please see the complete program guidelines for detailed funding information. AGENCY CONTACT:
INTERNAL REVIEW PROCESS: To screen proposals for this competition, an internal deadline has been established. Principal Investigators (PIs) interested in submitting an application should provide the following proposal information to their Associate Dean by Friday, October 10, 2008 for internal review purposes: 1. Project description (maximum length 5 pages) should include items a – e: (a) describe the system to be acquired and list any partner organizations involved in the 2. Budget and budget justification (two pages). 3. Biographical sketches: include 2-page NSF format biographical sketch for PI and Co-PIs who will be major users of the research instrumentation. 4. Review comments from any previous HPC submission. Following the Dean’s assessment of the internal application, it will be forwarded to Associate Provost Joan Kirkendall for review and then to the Office of the VP for Research for final selection. PIs will be informed if their proposal is selected for submission and advised of institutional cost-sharing commitments in time to complete and process their proposal for final review. REMARKS: Applications must be submitted electronically using either the NSF FastLane system or Grants.gov. Collaborative proposals must be submitted via FastLane. For more information about FastLane, or to register as a FastLane user, please contact Kathleen Foster in the Office of Sponsored Programs (OSP) at x3-4365 or kfoster@bu.edu. Information about Grants.gov for BU Investigators can be obtained on the OSP website at: http://www.bu.edu/osp/pdf/Grantsgovinfo.pdf. In addition, for investigators interested in submitting proposals via Grants.gov, NSF has published the NSF Grants.gov Application Guide which may be found online at: http://www.nsf.gov/bfa/dias/policy/docs/grantsgovguide.pdf. Investigators should contact the OSP Assistant Director assigned to their school or department as soon as possible to coordinate submission through either FastLane or Grants.gov. Complete program guidelines and application material (NSF 08-573 and GPG 08-1) may be obtained from the web site listed above or from the Office of Sponsored Programs (OSP). Please distribute this notice to any faculty or staff members who might be interested in the information. For more information, please contact the OSP at X3-4365 or ospinfo@bu.edu, or visit the OSP web site at http://www.bu.edu/osp. |
||
