NSF Announces the New Office of Cyberinfrastructure
July 26, 2005
Effective July 22, 2005, the National Science Foundation (NSF) created a new Office of Cyberinfrastructure (OCI). This new office is essentially the former Division of Shared Cyberinfrastructure, which had been part of Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE). This is not simply a renaming of the Division, but is a major change in management and reporting. The new Office of Cyberinfrastructure reports directly to the Director of NSF.
In addition, NSF created a Cyberinfrastructure Council (CIC), composed of the Director, Deputy Director, and Associate Directors, to review of NSF-wide cyberinfrastructure budget recommendations and provide oversight of activities in the area of cyberinfrastructure.
According to the NSF press release, the Office of Cyberinfrastructure "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."
