Foundations of Computing Processes and Artifacts (CPA)

The Foundations of Computing Processes and Artifacts (CPA) cluster supports basic research and education projects to advance discovery, learning, and application of scientific and engineering knowledge pertaining to the processes and artifacts for building computing systems.

Computing processes and artifacts range from formalisms, methods, models, algorithms and theories to languages, architectures, technology components, and a variety of physical manifestations of computing system software and hardware. Proposals submitted in response to this solicitation should describe transformative research to advance at a fundamental level the design, verification, evaluation, utilization, and understanding of computing systems to meet the future computational needs of our society.

Research areas of interest for the CPA cluster include the following: topics concerning the foundations of software and software engineering including analysis and testing of software, components and composition, formal methods, verification and synthesis, and programming language semantics, design, and implementation; software/hardware systems and techniques for reliable and high performance computing including parallel compilers, programming models, and run-time support for resource allocation and scheduling; computer system architecture spanning memory and I/O subsystems, interconnection networks, on-chip networks, processor microarchitecture, reconfigurable and application-specific architectures; multicore, multithreaded, and systems-on-a-chip; hardware and software tools for design, simulation, benchmarking, performance measurement and tuning, including performance metrics and evaluation tools; VLSI electronic design and pertinent analysis, synthesis and simulation algorithms; architecture and design for mixed media or future media (e.g., MEMs and nanotechnology); computer graphics and visualization topics such as photorealistic and non-photorealistic rendering of geometry, lighting and materials, mathematical modeling, physically-based graphics, scientific and information visualization, graphics and display hardware, computational photography, and mixed reality.

There are three categories of proposals described in this solicitation:

• Single Investigator or Small Group projects
• Team projects 
• Major Team projects