[Federal Register Volume 67, Number 235 (Friday, December 6, 2002)]
[Notices]
[Pages 72648-72650]
From the Federal Register Online via the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
[FR Doc No: 02-30917]


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DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY


Office of Science Financial Assistance Program Notice 03-11: 
Early Career Principal Investigator Program in Applied Mathematics, 
Collaboratory Research, Computer Science, and High-Performance Networks

AGENCY: U.S. Department of Energy.

ACTION: Notice inviting grant applications.

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SUMMARY: The Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR) of 
the Office of Science (SC), U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), hereby 
announces its interest in receiving applications for grants in support 
of its Early Career Principal Investigator Program. The purpose of this 
program is to support research in applied mathematics, collaboratory 
research, computer science, and networks performed by exceptionally 
talented scientists and engineers early in their careers. The full text 
of Program Notice 03-11 is available via the Internet using the 
following Web site address: http://www.science.doe.gov/production/grants/grants.html.

DATES: To permit timely consideration for award in Fiscal Year 2003, 
completed applications in response to this notice must be received by 
February 20, 2003, to be accepted for merit review and funding in 
Fiscal Year 2003.

ADDRESSES: Formal applications in response to this solicitation are to 
be electronically submitted by an authorized institutional business 
official through DOE's Industry Interactive Procurement System (IIPS) 
at:  http://e-center.doe.gov/. IIPS provides for the posting of 
solicitations and receipt of applications in a paperless environment 
via the Internet. In order to submit applications through IIPS, your 
business official will need to register at the IIPS Web site. The 
Office of Science will include attachments as part of this notice that 
provide the appropriate forms in PDF fillable format that are to be 
submitted through IIPS. Color images should be submitted in IIPS as a 
separate file in PDF format and identified as such. These images should 
be kept to a minimum due to the limitations of reproducing them. They 
should be numbered and referred to in the body of the technical 
scientific grant application as Color image 1, Color image 2, etc. 
Questions regarding the operation of IIPS may be e-mailed to the IIPS 
Help Desk at: center.doe.gov">HelpDesk@e-center.doe.gov, or you may call the help desk 
at: (800) 683-0751. Further information on the use of IIPS by the 
Office of Science is available at: http://www.sc.doe.gov/production/grants/grants.html
    If you are unable to submit an application through IIPS, please 
contact the Office of the Director, Grants and Contracts Division, 
Office of Science, DOE at: (301) 903-5212 in order to gain assistance 
for submission through IIPS or to receive special approval and 
instructions on how to submit printed applications.

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT: Dr. Samuel J. Barish, Office of 
Advanced Scientific Computing Research, SC-31/Germantown Building, U.S. 
Department of Energy, 1000 Independence Avenue, SW., Washington, DC 
20585-1290, telephone: (301) 903-5800, e-mail: 
[email protected].

SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION:

Program Mission

    The primary mission of the Office of Advanced Scientific Computing 
Research, which is carried out by the Mathematical, Information, and 
Computational Sciences (MICS) Division, is to discover, develop, and 
deploy the computational and networking tools that enable researchers 
in the scientific disciplines to analyze, model, simulate, and predict 
complex physical, chemical, and biological phenomena important to DOE. 
To accomplish this mission, the MICS Division fosters and supports 
fundamental research in advanced scientific computing applied 
mathematics, collaboratory research, computer science, and networking--
and operates supercomputers, a high performance network, and related 
facilities. Further descriptions of the base research portion of the 
MICS portfolio, which is the scope of this Notice, is provided below.

Applied Mathematical Sciences Research

    The objective of the applied mathematics component of the MICS 
research portfolio is to support research on the underlying 
mathematical understanding as well as the numerical algorithms needed 
to enable effective description and prediction of physical, chemical, 
and biological systems such as fluids, materials, magnetized plasmas, 
or protein molecules. This includes, but is not limited to, methods for 
solving large systems of partial differential equations on parallel 
computers, techniques for choosing optimal values for parameters in 
large systems with hundreds to hundreds of thousands of parameters, 
improving our understanding of fluid turbulence, and developing 
techniques for reliably estimating the errors in simulations of complex 
physical phenomena.
    In addition to the existing research topics described, MICS plans 
to invest in new areas of applied mathematics research to support DOE's 
mission. Such investments may include research in multiscale 
algorithms, the mathematics of feature identification in large 
datasets, asymptotically optimal algorithms for solving PDEs, fast 
multipole and related hybrid methods, and algorithms for handling 
complex systems with constraints. The MICS research portfolio in 
Applied Mathematics emphasizes investment in long-term research that 
will result in the next generation of computational tools for 
scientific discovery.

Collaboratory Research

    Collaboratories link geographically dispersed researchers, data, 
and tools via high performance networks to enable remote access to 
facilities, access to large datasets, shared environments, and ease of 
collaboration. The objective of the collaboratory component of the MICS 
portfolio is to support research for developing the software 
infrastructure that will enable universal, ubiquitous, easy access to 
remote resources or that will contribute to the ease with which 
distributed teams work together. Enabling high performance for 
distributed scientific applications is an important consideration. The 
middleware component for collaboratories encompasses activities in
    [sbull] Building the application frameworks that allow discipline 
scientists to express and manage the simulation, analysis, and data 
management aspects of overall problem solving

[[Page 72649]]

    [sbull] Supporting construction, management, and use of widely 
distributed application systems
    [sbull] Facilitating human collaboration through common security 
services, and resource and data sharing
    [sbull] Providing remote access to, and operation of, scientific 
and engineering instrumentation systems.
    [sbull] Managing and securing the computing and data infrastructure 
as a persistent service.
    This announcement also calls for grant applications to address the 
fundamental issues involved in providing uniform software services that 
manage and provide access to heterogeneous, distributed resources, that 
is, high-performance middleware services that support DOE's science 
mission. The emphasis is on investment in long-term research that will 
result in the next generation of high-performance software 
infrastructure for scientific discovery.

Computer Science Research

    The objective of the computer science component of the MICS 
research portfolio is to support research that results in a 
comprehensive, scalable, and robust high performance software 
infrastructure that translates the promise and potential of high peak 
performance to real performance improvements in DOE scientific 
applications. This software infrastructure must address needs for: 
Portability and interoperability of complex high performance scientific 
software packages; operating systems tools and support for the 
effective management of terascale and beyond systems; and effective 
tools for feature identification, data management, and visualization of 
petabyte-scale scientific data sets. The Computer Science component 
encompasses a multi-discipline approach with activities in:
    [sbull] Program development environments and tools--Component-
based, fully integrated, terascale program development and runtime 
tools, which scale effectively and provide maximum performance, 
functionality, and ease-of-use to developers and scientific end users.
    [sbull] Operating system software and tools--Systems software that 
scales to tens of thousands of processors, supports high performance 
application-level communication, and provides the highest levels of 
performance, fault tolerance, reliability, manageability, and ease of 
use for system administrators, tool developers, and end users.
    [sbull] Visualization and data management systems--Scalable, 
intuitive systems fully supportive of DOE application requirements for 
moving, storing, analyzing, querying, manipulating, and visualizing 
multi-petabytes of scientific data and objects.
    [sbull] Problem Solving Environments--Unified systems focused on 
the needs of specific scientific applications, which enable radically 
improved ease-of-use of complex systems software and tools by domain 
application scientists.
    The MICS research portfolio in Computer Science emphasizes 
investment in long-term research that will result in the next 
generation of high performance tools for scientific discovery.

High-Performance Networks Research

    In the next few years, complex science experiments in DOE are 
expected to generate several petabytes of data that will be transferred 
to geographically distributed terascale computing facilities for 
analysis and visualization by thousands of scientists across the world. 
In addition, many emerging energy research problems require coordinated 
access to distributed resources--people, data, computers, and 
facilities. This emerging, distributed terascale-science environment 
calls for ultra-high-speed networks--networks that can deliver multi-
gigabits/sec throughput to scientific applications securely. Grant 
applications in network research must therefore address the issues of 
ultra high-speed networks by focusing on:
    [sbull] Ultra high-speed network protocols--radical new approaches 
to ultra high-speed transport protocols that will outperform existing 
Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and User Designed Datagram (UDP) to 
efficiently harness the abundant bandwidth made possible by Dense Wave 
Division Multiplexing (DWDM) optical technologies. This may include 
transport mechanisms such as Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) over 
Lambda and OS-bypass over Lambda, that are capable of delivering and 
sustaining multi-Gigabits/sec (Gbs) throughput to high-end scientific 
applications.
    [sbull] Intelligent high-speed network interfaces--to significantly 
improve the end-to-end performance by addressing host system congestion 
issues, such as dynamically programmed transport protocol off-loading, 
OS bypass, electro-optical middleware, and high-speed I/O.
    [sbull] High-speed cyber security systems--that operate efficiently 
at ultra high-speed (2.5 Gbs and 10 Gbs). Such systems should be based 
on a sound theoretical foundation and formal techniques, and in 
addition could exploit Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques, such as 
fuzzy logic, neural networks, and genetic algorithms to improve their 
effectiveness.
    [sbull] Network modeling and traffic engineering--new techniques 
for modeling and characterization of chaotic behaviors in complex 
traffic patterns, dynamic behavior of protocols, cyber security 
systems, and congestion control mechanisms.
    Grant applications addressing the above problems must go beyond the 
development of tools and emphasize mathematical analysis, formal 
specification, and rigorous techniques for validating the performance 
of their proposed solutions.

Background: Early Career Principal Investigator Program

    This is the second year of the Early Career Principal Investigator 
Program. A principal goal of this program is to identify exceptionally 
talented applied mathematicians, collaboratory researchers, computer 
scientists, and high-performance networks researchers early in their 
careers and assist and facilitate the development of their research 
programs. Eligibility for awards under this notice is restricted to 
applicants who meet all of the following criteria:
    (1) Hold a tenure-track regular academic faculty position.
    (2) Have earned a Ph.D. degree or equivalent after July 1, 1998.
    (3) Are conducting research in applied mathematics, 
collaboratories, computer science, or high-performance networks.
    Applications should be submitted through a U.S. academic 
institution. Applicants should request support under this notice for 
normal research project costs as required to conduct their proposed 
research activities, such as part of the PI's salary, graduate and/or 
undergraduate students, post-doctoral researchers, equipment and 
facilities, and travel. However, no salary support will be provided for 
other faculty members or senior personnel.
    Applicants who have submitted or will be submitting similar grant 
applications to other programs are eligible for this notice, as long as 
the details of the other submission are contained in the grant 
application to DOE. Applicants who have an NSF CAREER award, or are 
applying for such an award, are eligible for this notice. Applicants do 
not have to be U.S. citizens, and may be non-permanent resident aliens 
or have an H1b visa.

Program Funding

    It is anticipated that up to $2 million will be available for up to 
twenty (20)

[[Page 72650]]

awards for exceptional applications in FY 2003 to meet the needs of the 
program, contingent upon the availability of appropriated funds. The 
maximum support that can be requested under this notice is $100,000 per 
year for three years.
    Multiple-year funding of grant awards is expected, with funding 
provided on an annual basis subject to the availability of funds, 
progress of the research, and programmatic needs. The typical duration 
of these grants is three years, and they will not normally be renewed 
after the project period has been completed. It is anticipated that at 
the end of the grant period, grantees will submit new grant 
applications to continue their research to DOE or other Federal funding 
agencies. We expect that the awards will be announced and the projects 
will begin in early summer 2003.

Merit Review

    Applications will be subjected to scientific merit review (peer 
review) and will be evaluated against the following evaluation 
criteria, which are listed in descending order of importance as 
codified at 10 CFR 605.10(d):
    (1) Scientific and/or Technical Merit of the Project;
    (2) Appropriateness of the Proposed Method or Approach;
    (3) Competency of Applicant's Personnel and Adequacy of Proposed 
Resources;
    (4) Reasonableness and Appropriateness of the Proposed Budget.
    The evaluation of applications under item 1, Scientific and 
Technical Merit, will pay attention to the responsiveness of the 
proposed research to the challenges of the MICS base research programs 
in Applied Mathematics, Collaboratory Research, Computer Science, and 
Network Research.
    It is expected that the application will include involvement of 
graduate and/or undergraduate students in the proposed work.
    Applicants are encouraged to collaborate with DOE National 
Laboratory researchers. The collaborations may include one, or more, 
extended visits to the laboratory by the applicant each year. Such an 
arrangement, if proposed, must be clearly explained in the grant 
application. Furthermore, a letter of support from the DOE National 
Laboratory collaborator(s) should be included with the application. A 
list of the DOE National Laboratories can be found at: http://www.sc.doe.gov/sub/lab_map/index.htm.
    Grantees under the Early Career Principal Investigator Program may 
apply for access to high-performance computing and network resources at 
several National Laboratories. Such resources include, but are not 
limited to, the National Energy Research Scientific Computing (NERSC) 
Center: http://www.sc.doe.gov/ascr/mics/nersc/index.html; the Advanced 
Computing Research Testbeds http://www.sc.doe.gov/ascr/mics/acrt/index.html; the Energy Sciences Network http://www.sc.doe.gov/ascr/mics/esnet/index.html; and the High-Performance Networking Research 
effort at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory; http://www.csm.ornl.gov/net.
    The evaluation under item 2, Appropriateness of the Proposed Method 
or Approach, will consider the quality of the proposed plan, if any, 
for interacting with a DOE National Laboratory.
    Please note that external peer reviewers are selected with regard 
to both their scientific expertise in the subject area of the grant 
application and the absence of conflict-of-interest issues. Non-federal 
reviewers will often be used, and submission of an application 
constitutes agreement that this is acceptable to the investigator and 
the submitting institution.

Submission Information

    Each grant application submitted should clearly indicate on which 
of the four following components of the MICS research portfolio the 
application is focused: Applied Mathematical Sciences Research, 
Collaboratory Research, Computer Science Research, or High-Performance 
Networks Research.
    The Project Description should be 20 pages or less, exclusive of 
the bibliography and other attachments. It must contain an abstract or 
project summary on a separate page with the name of the applicant, 
mailing address, phone, FAX and E-mail listed, and a short curriculum 
vita for the applicant.
    To provide a consistent format for the submission, review, and 
solicitation of grant applications under this notice, the preparation 
and submission of grant applications must follow the guidelines given 
in the Application Guide for the Office of Science Financial Assistance 
Program, 10 CFR part 605. Access to SC's Financial Assistance 
Application Guide is possible via the World Wide Web at: http://www.science.doe.gov/production/grants/grants.html. DOE is under no 
obligation to pay for any costs associated with the preparation or 
submission of applications if an award is not made.

(The Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance number for this program 
is 81.049, and the solicitation control number is ERFAP 10 CFR part 
605.)

    Issued in Washington, DC on December 2, 2002.
John Rodney Clark,
Associate Director of Science for Resource Management.
[FR Doc. 02-30917 Filed 12-5-02; 8:45 am]
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