Funding Opportunity Announcement: Integrated Computational and Data Infrastructure for Scientific Discovery

March 2021

Funding Opportunity Announcement: Integrated Computational and Data Infrastructure for Scientific Discovery

  • Letters of Intent (Required) Due: April 2, 2021, 5:00 p.m. Eastern Time
  • Proposals Due: May 14, 2021, 5:00 p.m. Eastern Time
  • Announcement Details: DE-FOA-0002482

The Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research within the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science announces its interest in funding research and development projects to create an advanced Integrated Computational and Data Infrastructure (ICDI) program. The ICDI program will accelerate research activities across the entire Office of Science complex. Over the past four decades experimental scientists (domain scientists working with a physical device, at a user facility, or in the field to understand scientific interactions), computational scientists (domain scientists developing and executing simulation codes to explore scientific phenomenon on leadership-class computers), and computer scientists (computer/data scientists and applied mathematicians developing scientific algorithms and codes) have increasingly used a wide array of computers and experiments to generate, analyze, and manage vast amounts of data. These data may be transferred from the facility and stored at a principal investigator’s home institution, a facility storage repository, or in a large central or distributed repository that individuals and teams access to conduct detailed analysis tasks. Combining, in real time, a variety of data, facilities, and computer resources coupled with machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques will greatly accelerate scientific discovery. The key challenge now is to move from today’s computational/computer scientist partnerships to deeply integrated collaborations that merge experimental scientists in with their computational/computer science peers. Moving forward, it is increasingly necessary to leverage the symbiotic relationships that exist between the experimental and computational sides of numerous DOE science communities (biology, chemistry, cosmology, Earth system science, environmental science, geosciences, material science and physics). To accomplish this, the Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research will collaborate with the other DOE Office of Science programs to research, develop, deploy, and validate a core suite of federated services.

This funding opportunity announcement (FOA) is composed of two topics:

  1. “Experimental/Computational/Computer Science collaborations” addresses the challenge of creating collaborative teams of scientists to accelerate science discoveries supported by the Office of Science programs. Applications to this topic must be submitted by multi-investigator teams.
  2. “Intelligent Distributed Infrastructure Simulation Capabilities” addresses the challenge of modeling, simulating, and validating the performance of geographically distributed science infrastructures. Both single- and multiple-investigator applications may be submitted.

Awards under this FOA will develop new software workflows and tools to accelerate the scientific discovery process through the convergence of experimental/simulation data, computational/experimental facilities, and a broad community of scientists to both generate high-fidelity simulations and steer experiments. Awards will also develop the modeling and simulation capabilities needed to predict and debug workflow performance in distributed computational and data infrastructures. See announcement for additional details. For any questions, contact the ICDI program manager: Richard Carlson, Richard.carlson@science.doe.gov.