Second NSF solicitation for Software Infrastructure for Scientific Innovation

On April 20, 2011, the National Science Foundation Office of Cyberinfrastructure announced the second Software Infrastructure for Sustained Innovation (SI^2) Program Solicitation 11-539 at http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2011/nsf11539/nsf11539.htm. I described the first solicitation (issued on March 16, 2010) in a post to this site on March 18, 2010. As I stated in that post, the solicitation is a promising one for supporting certain kinds of research and development for linguistic cyberinfrastructure, and I hope our community is able to take advantage of it. No awards in that area were made last year; I hope this year will be different! Unlike last year, no letter of intent is required. The deadline for full proposals is 5pm proposer’s local time on July 18, 2010.
Like last year, there are two categories of submissions for this solicitation; the third, Scientific Software Innovation Institutes (S2I2), will be separately solicited at some future date.
1. Scientific Software Elements (SSE)
2. Scientific Software Integration (SSI)
SSE awards are for small groups that will create and deploy robust software elements for which there is a demonstrated need. Read the solicitation, for the details. The projects should be for three years and their total budgets should not exceed $500K.
SSI awards are for larger multidisciplinary groups organized around a common research problem and common software infrastructure, and will result in sustainable community software serving a diverse community or communities. Again, read the solicitation, for the details. These are expected to total approximately $1M per year for 3-5 years.
The estimated program budget is $30M, to support 40 to 50 awards in FY 2012. The number of SSE and SSI awards will be determined by separate review processes and will be based on quality of proposals, availability of funds, and responsiveness to priorities of the participating directorates and divisions.
Prospective PIs should contact a program officer from the list of Cognizant Program Officers in the division or directorate closest to the major disciplinary impact of the proposed work to ascertain that the scientific focus and budget of the proposed work are appropriate for the solicitation. In the Social, Behavioral & Economic Sciences (SBE) Directorate, that Program Officer is Cheryl Eavey. In the Computer & Information Science & Engineering (CISE) Directorate, they are Almadena Chtchelkanova and Sol Greenspan. All three can be reached at the email alias SI2Query@nsf.gov, and their individual telephone numbers are given in the solicitation. You are welcome to copy me on any email message about SI^2 that you send at dlangend@nsf.gov, or to call me at (703) 292-5088.
There is a limit of one proposal to SI^2 per senior personnel (individual for whom a bio sketch is submitted); see the solicitation for details.