EAGER: : Best Practices and Models for Sustainability for Robust Cyberinfrastructure Software

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The NSF Software Infrastructure for Sustained Innovation (SI2) program solicitation states that software is "central to NSF's vision of a Cyberinfrastructure Framework for 21st Century Science and Engineering (CIF21)," and goes on to emphasize that in general software is essential to computational and data-enabled science. Indeed, the SI2 program is one vehicle by which the NSF hopes to enable sustained and well supported software providing services and functionality needed by the US science and engineering community. This yearlong study of cyberinfrastructure projects will identify best practices in the development, deployment, and support of robust cyberinfrastructure software. Through a combination of detailed case studies and surveys of software producers and users, the investigators will identify best practices for the process of moving software from a "discovery" process to well maintained and sustainable infrastructure for 21st century science and engineering, focusing in particular on the following: Given a piece of software that provides interesting capabilities and a community that wants to use (and possibly contribute to the further development of) that software, what steps are necessary to transform that software from "interesting tool" to "robust and widely used element of national infrastructure, contributing to the NSF vision for CIF21" - ands then support and maintain that tool sustainably? This research will lead to greater availability of widely usable software tools and curriculum materials, increasing the quality of education in computer science, computational science, and STEM disciplines.