NSF Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure

Funds advanced computing, data infrastructure, and cyberinfrastructure projects for United States research communities.

The NSF Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure is a division within the US National Science Foundation's CISE directorate. It funds the design, deployment, and operation of advanced research cyberinfrastructure: national-scale computing, data systems, networking, cybersecurity, and open-source software that support US science and engineering. Its awards are NSF awards, not a separate legal grant stream.

The active program set includes CICI for cybersecurity innovation for cyberinfrastructure, IDSS for integrated data systems and services, ACCESS as the national HPC allocations system, and Campus Cyberinfrastructure for institutional infrastructure support. The structured record also points to awards up to $1.2 million for CICI, up to $500,000 for the ACCESS / Pathways for Computational Innovation route, and cooperative-agreement support for IDSS. The homepage also surfaces NAIRR Operations Center and FAIROS as active funding families.

OAC is a fit for research groups, campus teams, and infrastructure builders working on shared computing and data systems rather than project science alone. Its emphasis is operational capacity, interoperability, and security, so successful proposals are usually the ones that solve a platform problem for a broader research community. That makes it one of NSF's most important routes for the backbone of AI and computational research.