The Global Initiative to Enhance @scale and Distributed Computing and Analysis Technologies (GECAT) project at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) has two exciting new funding opportunities. The GECAT project is part of the National Science Foundation’s Science Across Virtual Institutes (SAVI) program and is an extension of the NSF-funded Blue Waters project, which provides access to one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers and enables investigators to conduct breakthrough computational and big data research.

The first is to establish new International Virtual Research Organizations (IVRO) partnerships.

NCSA is interested in soliciting proposals for new IVROs that will address and solve important challenges that either have been amplified or have emerged as a consequence of the transition from petascale to extreme scale, the increasing importance of data-centric computing, workflow systems that enable effective use of high end computer and/or data problems. The proposed IVROs should bring together leading institutions from around the world to address these types of problems.

To propose a project, please see more here.

The second is to seed new international collaborations with existing NCSA IVROs.

GECAT has two IVROs established. One is the Joint Laboratory for Extreme Scale Computing (JLESC)—in collaboration with INRIA, the Jülich Supercomputing Center (JSC), Argonne National Laboratory (ANL), the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), and the Riken Advanced Institute for Computational Science—and is focused on HPC topic areas. The second IVRO with a focus on “big data” and data analysis areas is still being established with 4-6 peer research institutions in the Pan-Pacific region.

Our GECAT budget allows for small awards to US investigators—up to $25,000 a year, initially for one year with possible extensions for additional years—to be made for collaborative seed projects (travel, salary).

To propose a project, please see more here.

Both solicitations are open calls and do not have associated deadlines. Submitted proposals will be peer reviewed with final funding decisions being made by the project director on recommendations from the project steering committee.

If you have any questions about these solicitations, please contact Jay Roloff here.