Community Infrastructure for Research in Computer and Information Science and Engineering | 23 589

Opportunity Information: Apply for 23 589

The National Science Foundation (NSF) Community Research Infrastructure for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CIRC) program is a grant opportunity focused on building, improving, and sustaining shared research infrastructure for the computer and information science and engineering community. The central idea is to fund infrastructure that is bigger than any single lab or project: resources, platforms, tools, datasets, testbeds, and related capabilities that can support many researchers pursuing focused research agendas across core CISE areas. The program sits within NSF's Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) and spans its three divisions: Computing and Communication Foundations (CCF), Computer and Network Systems (CNS), and Information and Intelligent Systems (IIS). The intent is to enable research advances that would be difficult or impossible with existing infrastructure, while also improving how researchers access, use, and help guide the evolution of these shared resources.

A defining feature of CIRC is that it does not treat infrastructure as just hardware or software. It also emphasizes the "community layer" around the infrastructure: user services, documentation, onboarding, support, training, outreach, and mechanisms for community governance and feedback. Proposals are expected to show how the infrastructure will attract and grow a robust user community, how that community will have a meaningful role in shaping directions and priorities, and how the infrastructure will be managed in a way that supports high-quality, reliable access. Sustainability is a major theme: the program aims to create infrastructure that can endure through ongoing community involvement and leadership rather than being entirely dependent on a small set of creators.

Equitable access is another key goal. CIRC specifically highlights broadening participation by ensuring that researchers across a wide range of institutions of higher education can use these resources, including minority-serving institutions and predominantly undergraduate institutions. It also points to access for researchers from non-profit, non-academic organizations, signaling that the intended user base extends beyond traditional research-intensive universities. In practical terms, this means competitive projects will typically need to demonstrate strong plans for outreach, inclusive user engagement, and low-friction access pathways so that the infrastructure benefits a genuinely broad community.

The program supports four main award classes, which map to different stages of maturity and scale. Planning Community Infrastructure (Planning) awards fund the early work needed to organize and align a research community around a potential new shared infrastructure effort. These awards are about convening stakeholders, refining requirements, assessing feasibility, and building a credible roadmap. Planning efforts can be oriented toward a future CIRC proposal (Planning-C) or toward the NSF Mid-scale Research Infrastructure (MsRI) program (Planning-M), depending on the eventual scale and fit.

Exploratory Development (Dev) awards fund validation of early-stage, unproven infrastructure designs or technologies that could be the basis for transformative community infrastructure later. The emphasis here is on de-risking: demonstrating that a novel approach can work in practice, or that key technical components can meet performance, usability, or reliability needs. A successful Dev project is expected to produce the technical foundation for a follow-on proposal in CIRC (such as New or Grand) or in the Mid-scale RI-1 or RI-2 tracks.

Medium Community Infrastructure (Medium) awards support building new community infrastructure or significantly enhancing existing infrastructure, with the integrated tools, resources, and user-facing services needed to make it genuinely usable at community scale. Medium awards include two flavors: New (creating a new infrastructure capability) and Enhance/Sustain (ENS) (upgrading, expanding, or helping sustain an existing infrastructure). The expectation is that these projects will combine the core technical buildout with serious attention to user support, community engagement, and outreach so that the infrastructure directly enables innovative research across the CISE core areas.

Grand Community Infrastructure (Grand) awards support the largest and most ambitious efforts. These projects involve substantial work to develop new infrastructure or to enhance and sustain existing infrastructure at a level that supports world-class research opportunities for broad communities of CISE researchers, explicitly extending well beyond the awardee organization or organizations. In other words, Grand projects are meant to serve as major community assets, with a strong emphasis on scale, reach, robustness, and long-term value to the field.

For Medium and Grand awards, the solicitation notes that budgets may include support for operating the infrastructure, not just building it. This reflects an understanding that high-impact community infrastructure requires ongoing operations: maintenance, user support, reliability engineering, upgrades, and service management. Proposals in these categories should therefore make a credible case that the team and host organization(s) are positioned to deliver a high quality of service for the expected user community.

From the opportunity details provided, this is a discretionary NSF grant program (CFDA 47.070) in the science and technology research and development category. The funding opportunity number is 23-589, with an award ceiling listed as $5,000,000 and an expected 25 awards. The original closing date shown is September 8, 2023. Eligibility is summarized as "Others" with additional clarification referenced in the full solicitation, indicating that applicants should consult the official eligibility language to confirm organizational fit and any constraints.

Overall, CIRC is designed for teams that want to build community-facing research infrastructure in core computing fields and can demonstrate more than technical excellence: they must also show thoughtful community governance, inclusive access, strong user services, and a path toward sustainability. The strongest matches are proposals that clearly identify the community they will serve, the specific research frontiers the infrastructure will unlock, and the practical plan for making the infrastructure reliable, well-managed, and broadly usable over time.

• The National Science Foundation in the science and technology and other research and development sector is offering a public funding opportunity titled "Community Infrastructure for Research in Computer and Information Science and Engineering" and is now available to receive applicants.
• Interested and eligible applicants and submit their applications by referencing the CFDA number(s): 47.070.
• This funding opportunity was created on May 13, 2023.
• Applicants must submit their applications by Sep 08, 2023. (Agency may still review applications by suitable applicants for the remaining/unused allocated funding in 2026.)
• Each selected applicant is eligible to receive up to $5,000,000.00 in funding.
• The number of recipients for this funding is limited to 25 candidate(s).
• Eligible applicants include: Others (see text field entitled Additional Information on Eligibility for clarification).

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