NSF and the FireSeed Streaming Supercomputer Project

The National Science Foundation (NSF) and the FireSeed Streaming Supercomputer (FS3) Project are an excellent fit for many reasons.

The challenge for me is to connect with the 'right' people and present those reasons for a good NSF fit with FS3 in a way that inspires them to support the project with the grant money necessary to move the project forward.

Primary reasons for a good fit between NSF and FS3 are:

1. There is a critical and basic scientific research need to develop new parallel programming paradigms for many-core processors. The FS3 project will help develop these paradigms.
2. There is strong demand for improved effectiveness of virtual organizations in scientific research, as well as in other areas of human endeavors. The FS3 project is creating a global virtual organization and provides opportunities to research and document what makes a virtual organizations effective.
3. Scientific research in emerging technologies, such as biomedical and nanotechnology, will benefit greatly from the low-cost supercomputing power provided by the FS3 systems.
4. The FS3 project aligns well with the recent proposal by Vijay Agarwala, Director, Research Computing and Cyberinfrastructure Information Technology Services at Penn State University for the NSF to fund 20 to 25 university-based Tier 3 computing centers.
5. The FS3 combination of flat world, open source concepts and knowledge economy practices will put the project at the frontiers of collaborative e-Research.

To move the FS3 project ahead with the NSF, follow up work is being done with new contacts from the recent NSF workshop on "Building Effective Virtual Organizations" and possibilities for NSF grant collaboration are being explored with several universities. If a clear and persuasive picture of the FS3 project can be put in front of the necessary people and the timing is right, the FS3 project could well become a fantastically fun and absolutely critical project funded by the NSF.

Time will tell.

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