Challenges in Selecting Software to be Reused

Software is an integral enabler of computation, experiment and theory and a primary modality for realizing NSF's Cyberinfrastructure Framework for 21st Century Science and Engineering (CIF21) vision 1. Scientific discovery and innovation are advancing along fundamentally new pathways opened by development of increasingly sophisticated software. Software is also directly responsible for increased scientific productivity and significant enhancement of researchers' capabilities. In order to nurture, accelerate and sustain this critical mode of scientific progress, NSF has established the Software Infrastructure for Sustained Innovation (SI 2) program, with the overarching goal of transforming innovations in research and education into sustained software resources that are an integral part of the cyberinfrastructure. SI 2 's intent is to foster a pervasive cyberinfrastructure to help researchers address problems of unprecedented scale, complexity, resolution, and accuracy by integrating computation, data, networking, observations and experiments in novel ways. NSF expects that its SI 2 investment will result in robust, reliable, usable and sustainable software infrastructure that is critical to achieving the CIF21 vision and will transform science and engineering while contributing to the education of next generation researchers and creators of future cyberinfrastructure. It is expected that SI 2 will generate and nurture the interdisciplinary processes required to support the entire software lifecycle, and will successfully integrate software development and support with innovation and research. Furthermore, it will result in the development of sustainable software communities that transcend scientific and geographical boundaries. The goal of the SI 2 program is to create a software ecosystem that includes all levels of the software stack and scales from individual or small groups of software innovators to large hubs of software excellence. The SI2 program, similar to many other NSF programs, primarily supports projects that are proposed in response to solicitations, such as the recent NSF 13-­‐525 2. These proposals are then reviewed by a peer-­‐ review group, who in addition to the standard NSF criteria of intellectual merit and broader impacts, review the project on the following criteria: • Does the proposal discuss how the proposed software will fill a recognized need and advance research capability within a significant area (or areas) of science and engineering? • Does the proposal provide a project plan and timeline, including a proof-­‐of-­‐concept demonstration of any key software element and the steps necessary presented to take the software from prototype to dissemination into the community as reusable software resources? • Are tangible metrics …