NSF creates Office of Cyberinfrastructure

Published 07/22/2005

In a statement to National Science Foundation employees, Director Arden Bement, Jr. today (July 22, 2005) announced that effective immediately the Division of Shared Cyberinfrastructure at NSF has been renamed the Office of Cyberinfrastructure (OCI) and the reporting line has been changed from the Directorate of Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) to the Office of the Director.

The Office of Cyberinfrastructure coordinates and supports the acquisition, development and provision of state-of-the-art cyberinfrastructure resources, tools and services essential to the conduct of 21st century science and engineering research and education.

OCI supports cyberinfrastructure resources, tools and related services such as supercomputers, high-capacity mass-storage systems, system software suites and programming environments, scalable interactive visualization tools, productivity software libraries and tools, large-scale data repositories and digitized scientific data management systems, networks of various reach and granularity from dedicated high-speed backbone networks that connect high-performance computational resources and high-end instrumentation sites to wireless networks that connect embedded sensor nodes in remote scientific field sites, and an array of software tools and services that hide the complexities and heterogeneity of contemporary cyberinfrastructure while seeking to provide ubiquitous access and enhanced usability.

OCI supports the preparation and training of current and future generations of researchers and educators to use cyberinfrastructure to further their research and education goals, while also supporting the scientific and engineering professionals who create and maintain these IT-based resources and systems and who provide essential customer services to the national science and engineering user community.

Effective this date, Dr. Deborah Crawford will serve as the Acting Director, OCI. "We are grateful for Dr. Sangtae Kim's excellent service and wish him well as he returns to Purdue University and the Donald W. Feddersen Distinguished Professorship to engage in research on the enabling role of cyberinfrastructure at the intersection of the biological, computational and mathematical sciences," said Bement in a statement.

The NSF also announced the establishment of the Cyberinfrastructure Council (CIC). CIC responsibilities include contributing to CI strategic planning, the development and review of NSF-wide CI budget recommendations, and oversight of CI assessment and evaluation activities.

The Cyberinfrastructure Council (CIC) will comprise the NSF Director and Deputy Director, NSF Assistant Directors for Biological Sciences (BIO), Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE), Education and Human Resources (EHR), Engineering (ENG), Geosciences (GEO), Mathematical and Physical Sciences (MPS), and Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (SBE), and the Directors of the Office of Cyberinfrastructure (OCI), the Office of International Science and Engineering (OISE) and the Office of Polar Programs (OPP).