NSF CC* Specific Resources

Including EPOC in a Proposal

The community has told us that occasionally, while writing a proposal, they have identified a  challenge within the project that they believe to be well suited to a collaboration with EPOC. We offer the following suggestions to indicate your intent to engage with EPOC, hence indicating in your proposal that you both recognize the challenge and take it seriously.

Identify and utilize EPOC resources

Our Materials page and the Fasterdata Knowledge Base provide some recommendations and templates for establishing and maintaining cyberinfrastructure associated with data movement challenges and understanding scientific use of technology, including online training materials, and webinars that cover many topics tailored to the NSF CI community.

Indicate Your Intent to Approach EPOC

We invite proposing NSF CI projects to indicate their intention to approach EPOC once they are funded. EPOC resources and staff are available to assist NSF projects with cyberinfrastructure plans and training, via Roadside Assistance and Consulting, training, and other EPOC activities. Proposers are free to include language showing an awareness of cyberinfrastructure options for a specific issue and showing you are aware of EPOC, how we can help, and that you plan to approach us if funded to collaborate on addressing the issue. You can do this unilaterally without any commitment from EPOC (but please be aware it does not commit EPOC – we do our best to help all NSF projects, but are subject to our own resource availability). We ask that you let us know (email us at epoc@tacc.utexas.edu) if you reference EPOC this way to help us plan ahead.

Possible language to include in a proposal:

Our proposal team recognizes [that understanding science drivers and barriers to technology adoption  is important for the effort we are undertaking | we have challenges with regards to understanding scientific use cases within our campus/facility ]. To address this issue we plan to approach the NSF-funded Engagement and Performance Operations Center (EPOC)  (http://epoc.global). EPOC engages projects such as the one we propose to help them address gaps in understanding scientific adoption and use of technology, along with addressing any friction that may exist in supporting end-to-end workflows. We understand that engagements with EPOC are collaborative, and have budgeted resources in our project to work with EPOC on our challenge.

EPOC can also provide a letter of collaboration for your proposal using this template. When you request a letter please include a one-page summary of your project for review.

• EPOC Letter of Collaboration

Include EPOC in your Proposal

You can include one or more of the EPOC Partners (TACC/UT Austin, LBNL/ESnet) via a subcontract on your proposal, a process that provides a firm commitment of our participation. Please contact us to discuss which partner would be most appropriate, whether the commitment would be exclusive for a given solicitation, and the level of effort that would be involved. In this case, we would provide a custom letter of collaboration indicating our agreement to the terms of the subcontract.