Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Coordination Ecosystem: Services & Support - Coordination Office (ACCESS-ACO)

The national research cyberinfrastructure (CI) ecosystem is essential to computational- and data-intensive research across all of 21^st-century science and engineering (S&E), driven by rapid advances in a wide range of technologies; increasing volumes of highly heterogeneous data; and escalating demand by the research community. Research CI is a key catalyst for discovery and innovation and plays a critical role in ensuring US leadership in S&E, economic competitiveness, and national security, consistent with the NSF’s mission. NSF, through the Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure (OAC), has published a vision that calls for the broad availability and innovative use of an agile, integrated, robust, trustworthy and sustainable CI ecosystem that can drive new thinking and transformative discoveries in all areas of S&E research and education. In support of this vision, NSF is releasing two solicitations in parallel: this solicitation, Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Coordination Ecosystem: Services & Support – Coordination Office (ACCESS-ACO), and Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Coordination Ecosystem: Services & Support (ACCESS). This solicitation focuses on the creation of a coordination office to support the collective and coordinated operation of the NSF ACCESS solicitation awardees. The ACCESS solicitation aims to establish a suite of CI coordination services—meant to support a broad and diverse set of requirements, users, and usage modes from all areas of S&E research and education—and calls for proposals for five independently-managed yet tightly-cooperative service tracks (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: Network of ACCESS services, with a focus on the ACO Services.

This solicitation expects to fund one award for an ACCESS Coordination Office (ACO) to support the collective and coordinated operation of the five CI coordination services. Specifically, the ACO will provide coordination and support services and staffing for top-level coordination and communications among the ACCESS awardees and with the public, including support for top-level inter-awardee governance, coordination of an external advisory board to the ACCESS awardees, maintenance of the top-level landing page of the ACCESS website, and coordinated community-building activities. The ACO awardee will interface with the awardees for the ACCESS service tracks of the ACCESS solicitation. The ACO itself will not engage in overall governance or management responsibilities for the ACCESS but awardees will enable the other ACCESS awardees to accomplish those activities through provision of staffing and services.