Computing in the Cloud

Cloud services represent a growing paradigm of on-demand access (as a service) to computing, data and software utilities, an abstraction of unlimited resources, and a usage-based billing model where users essentially "rent" virtual resources and pay for what they use. Underlying these cloud (infrastructure, platform, data, software, etc.) services are consolidated and virtualized data centers that provide virtual machine (VM) containers hosting computation and applications from a large numbers of distributed users. It is anticipated that cloud platforms and services will increasingly play a critical role in academic, government and industry sectors, and will thus have widespread societal impact.NSF's goal is to provide the science and engineering communities with the opportunity to leverage highly-scalable cloud computing platforms to conduct research and education activities in cloud computing and data-intensive computing, and their applications. This solicitation specifically focuses on the use of Microsoft's Windows Azure platform as a complement to the computational platforms that NSF has made available to the research community to date. While the main focus of the Computing in the Cloud (CiC) program is to stimulate basic and applied research in cloud computing through the Microsoft Azure platform, the potential to foster simultaneous advances in other fields of science and engineering is both recognized and encouraged.CiC proposals may be submitted in response to this solicitation, or as supplements to existing awards, or as EAGER proposals, as described later in this solicitation.