CNS: Computer Systems Research (CSR)

Computer systems support a broad range of applications and technologies that seamlessly integrate with human users. While many key building blocks of computer systems are today commercial technologies, the challenge ahead is to envision new technologies, as well as to combine existing technologies, software, and sensing systems into the computer systems of the future that will span wearable computing, the Internet of Things (IoT), Augmented Reality/Virtual Reality (AR/VR), smart environments, intelligent transportation systems, personalized healthcare, data intensive and distributed systems, energy-efficient and sustainable computing, emerging workloads, digital twins, AI-enabled, Post-Moore and quantum computing models and architectures and beyond. Such computer systems will require new, innovative, and visionary approaches to hardware, wired and wireless communications, and consideration of human-computer interactions, that are limited only by the imagination. These systems will need to be reliable in the presence of unreliable components, networking, and configurations, adaptive to changing environments and computer usage scenarios, attentive to unintended consequences of their operations, capable of supporting high-throughput applications and large-scale data storage and processing, maintain privacy and security, and able to meet performance and energy objectives for applications ranging from very low-power embedded systems to large high-performance computing systems. Clean-slate approaches considering security, privacy and energy-efficiency by design are particularly welcome.

The Computer Systems Research (CSR) program supports transformative scientific and engineering research leading to the development of the next generation of highly performant, heterogeneous, energy-efficient, environmentally sustainable, secure and privacy-preserving computer systems. The scope of the program includes embedded and multicore systems and accelerators; mobile and extensible distributed systems; cloud and data-intensive processing systems; and memory, storage, and file systems. The program seeks innovative research proposals that will advance the reliability, performance, power, energy-efficiency, security and privacy, scalability, and sustainability of computer systems.

Note: Some projects might be appropriate for joint consideration by NeTS and CSR and may be submitted to either program for joint review.

Funding Opportunities for the Computer Systems Research (CSR) Program:

Computer and Network Systems (CNS): Core Programs.  NSF 24-589