The Earth and Space Sciences (ESS) Project issued a $24 million Cooperative Agreement Notice (CAN) on May 15, 1995 for "Grand Challenge Applications and Enabling Scalable Computing Testbed(s)" to accelerate the development and application of high-performance computing technologies to meet NASA Earth and space science requirements. Cooperative Agreements are tightly coupled partnerships between NASA and a member of academia or industry to achieve joint objectives. Consequently, there must be resource sharing on both sides, and all payments made by the Government are triggered by the achievement of negotiated performance milestones. The Selection Official for this CAN was Lee Holcomb, Director of NASA Headquarters' Aviation Systems Technology Division (which includes the NASA High Performance Computing and Communications Program).
This CAN solicited proposals for two separate areas -- Earth and space science Grand Challenge investigations and computing testbeds. Though evaluated independently, the selected Grand Challenge teams would ultimately be driven to collaborate with the selected Testbed vendor to meet the ESS Project performance milestones of 10, 50, and 100 gigaFLOPS sustained performance (due in July 1996, 1997, and 1998 respectively) on each team's application codes -- required milestones for each team and for the vendor.
The solicitation was announced via postcards to the NASA Earth Science (Code Y), Space Science (Code S), and Microgravity Science (Code U) mailing lists, advertising the World Wide Web address of the online CAN document. This CAN was the first implementation of a now standard NASA electronic solicitation process, realizing a cost savings of $92,000 in printing and postage alone. Preproposal conferences were held on June 8 and 9, 1995 at NASA/GSFC for potential Grand Challenge Investigators and Testbed vendors respectively. Proposals were due on August 2, 1995.
The two sets of proposals had independent evaluation processes. Grand Challenge Investigator proposals were evaluated by a mailed peer review, where each proposal was evaluated by two physical scientists in the appropriate discipline and one computational scientist. A set of Discipline Panels convened for a 3-day meeting to rank proposals based on the mail reviews within each discipline. Following these rankings, a recommendation was made to a NASA Headquarters Selection Committee, who integrated all discipline proposals and produced the final ranking and recommendation for negotiations. This information was presented to a the CAN Selection Official to make the selection for negotiations.
Testbed proposals were evaluated by a NASA technical evaluation committee, concurrently with (but blind to) the Investigator proposal evaluation process. Proposals were ranked and presented to the CAN Selection Official for selection for site visits. The purpose of the site visits was to validate reported CAN benchmark performance. Following site visits, the CAN Selection Official recommended that the committee submit questions to the leading proposers to clarify unclear information. With that information, the CAN Selection Official selected one vendor for negotiations.
Following negotiations, ESS awarded cooperative agreements to nine Grand Challenge Investigator Teams and one Testbed vendor. Each agreement is for a 3-year period. For that duration, the Testbed vendor will place a continuously available testbed at GSFC on which the Investigator teams will optimize their codes and demonstrate the milestone goals. The vendor will also provide applications engineers to aid the Investigator teams in improving code performance. The Government does not take ownership of the Testbed, which will be returned to the vendor upon conclusion of the cooperative agreement. (The 10 gigaFLOPS milestone must be demonstrated on the continuously available Testbed, but the 50 gigaFLOPS and 100 gigaFLOPS milestones may be demonstrated on remote systems, provided that 25 gigaFLOPS can be demonstrated on the continously available Testbed.)
In addition to the performance milestones required for each Grand Challenge team, each application code that meets a milestone must be released to the National HPCC Software Exchange. These codes will assist the general NASA Earth and space science community to migrate their applications to a scalable parallel computing system. A portion of the CAN Testbed cycles has been allocated to this community to enable this transition. Testbed cycles also have been allocated to the HPCC Computational Aerosciences (CAS) Project, the Testbed vendor, the ESS Systems Evaluation team and third party software developers.
Table of Contents | Section Contents -- Applications | Subsection Contents -- Science Team II
