To request access to NAIRR Pilot Classroom resources, you must prepare a description, no longer than three (3) pages, describing your course and requirements for computational resources available through this program. Do not include any proprietary information in proposals.

Eligibility

This call is open to proposals by US based educators and researchers who are teaching undergraduate or graduate courses or shorter duration training sessions to US based students that include subject matter in artificial intelligence and require that students use advanced computational resources as part of their coursework. Courses from any discipline are eligible for this program. Courses and training sessions must not allow participants who are not US based.

Available Resources

Review Criteria and Project Expectations

There are no specific constraints on the courses eligible for this opportunity. Examples include:

• Computer science (or information science, or data science) courses on machine learning, artificial intelligence (AI), or intelligent systems
• Domain science courses or trainings that are incorporating AI into the curriculum
• Independent study courses of any discipline incorporating AI. This opportunity is also available to Instructors who are developing a course or tools for the classroom and need computational resources to complete testing prior to offering their course.

Requests that are outside the scope of this opportunity, notably those for research and development, may be eligible through the NAIRR Pilot researcher and other opportunities. The proposals will be evaluated on the following criteria:

• Alignment with the educational and workforce development focus of this call
• Readiness of the planned course, including institutional support commensurate with what is proposed. The resources offered assume that an instructor, teaching assistant, or other person will be the primary source of technical support for students accessing and using the resources.
• Match of request to the resources offered, and available.

Please note the following parameters and expectations:

• All supported classes will have the name of the primary educator, affiliation, and name of the course posted to the NAIRR Pilot website.
• All primary educators and teaching assistants will be added to a NAIRR Pilot chat channel to foster community.
• All primary educators are expected to go through an exit interview focused on feedback to improve the NAIRR Classroom pilot.

Project Description Outline

To ensure your request can be properly reviewed and awards be directed to the appropriate resource(s), your description should include the sections outlined here.

A. Course Description

• Institution name and course name
• The course contact's name and email address
• Include URL to the course if available
• Course start and end dates
• Number of students expected
• How the computing resources requested support the educational objectives of the course
• Expected method students will access the resources, e.g., JupyterLab, gateway, direct access via SSH
• Describe when will the resource be used, i.e., during class time, project work outside of the class, during quizzes, mid-terms, and finals, or other information to help reviewers understand expectations about on-demand use of resources

B. Estimate of Compute, Storage and Other Resources

To the extent possible, provide an estimate of the scale and type of the resources needed for the course. The information in the Resources section below is available to help you answer this question. Please be as specific as possible in your resource request along with any data you have supporting the request. Your proposal should indicate your preferred resource (if any) and your first alternate choice, should there not be sufficient availability on your preferred resource. Please select only your preferred resource in the online submission form.

• Computing architectures or systems that are most appropriate for the course (e.g. GPUs, large memory, large core counts on shared memory nodes, etc.)
• Estimated computing resource required for each student in terms of core, node, or GPU hours, and memory
• Can this course be supported in a cloud environment?
• Describe the storage needs of the project.
• Does your project require access to any public datasets? If so, please describe these datasets, where they reside, and how you intend to use them.
• Does your project require access to specific software packages? If so, describe this software (including whether it is open source or licensed) and how you intend to use it.
• How much persistent storage per student
• Describe the structure of the data in terms of file counts and file sizes
• If no resources meet your requirements, please explain why.

C. Support Needs

Describe whether collaboration or support from staff at various NAIRR Pilot Resource Providers (e.g. Commercial Cloud Providers, academic research computing centers, data or tool providers) will be essential, helpful, or unnecessary. Estimates of necessary application support are very helpful. Teams should also identify any restrictions that might apply to the project, such as export-controlled code, ITAR restrictions, proprietary data sets, regional location of compute resources, or personal health information (PHI) or HIPAA restrictions. In such cases, please provide information on security, privacy, and access issues.

D. Team and Team Preparedness

Summarize your team's qualifications and readiness to execute the project both in using the methods proposed and the resources requested.

• What is the expected lead time before you can begin using the resource?
• What systems have you recently used and what was the scale of the applications?
• Given that some resources are at federal facilities with restrictions, please provide a list of the team members (e.g. technical staff, teaching assistants, etc.) that will require accounts on resources along with their citizenship.

Supporting Documents

In addition to the main proposal document, please also prepare a CV or other biographical sketch document for the project team lead. Biosketch documents prepared for federal funding agency grant proposals would satisfy this requirement.

Document Formatting

While readability is of greatest importance, documents must satisfy the following minimum requirements. Documents that conform to National Science Foundation proposal format guidelines will satisfy these guidelines.

• Margins: Documents must have 2.5-cm (1-inch) margins at the top, bottom, and sides.
• Fonts and Spacing: The type size used throughout the documents must conform to the following three requirements:
  • Use one of the following typefaces identified below:
    • Arial 11, Courier New, or Palatino Linotype at a font size of 10 points or larger;
    • Times New Roman at a font size of 11 points or larger; or
    • Computer Modern family of fonts at a font size of 11 points or larger.
  • A font size of less than 10 points may be used for mathematical formulas or equations, figures, table or diagram captions and when using a Symbol font to insert Greek letters or special characters. PIs are cautioned, however, that the text must still be readable.
  • Type density must be no more than 15 characters per 2.5 cm (1 inch).
  • No more than 6 lines must be within a vertical space of 2.5 cm (1 inch).
• Page Numbering: Page numbers should be included in each file by the submitter. Page numbering is not provided by the submission system.
• File Format: Only PDF file formats are accepted.

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