The Department of Energy’s (DOE) topic announcement for Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Funding Opportunities lists three sub-categories for the Office of Advanced Scientific Computer Research, the most general of which concerns “Accelerating the Deployment of Advanced Software Technologies” (AST). The maximum Phase I award will be $200,000, and the Phase II max will be $1.1 million. The DOE says that applications “must critically depend on” software packages funded by the Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR). I guess ASCR funds software packages but doesn’t write their own, using in-house staff. The topic announcement says that projects should be “non-proprietary enhancements of general utility to the ASCR-funded software,” but it doesn’t specifically use the term “open source,” which seems like a peculiar omission. Maybe “open source” sounds too political to them.
As of August 8, the complete Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) has been released, with a letter of intent (LOI) deadline of August 29, and a final application deadline of October 11. So, as of this writing, the money is on the table.
The topic announcement does strongly recommend that at least one major maintainer from each software package be involved in any given project, which implies that the DOE sees this project as a subsidy to these specific packages. Open-source software advocates sometimes wish to see more public support for open-source software, and these funding opportunity announcements (FOA) are an example of that support.
Not all software writers are also high-performance writers in English, or know how to complete technically correct DOE proposals; that’s where we can come into play. We’ve written many funded DOE proposals and some related to software projects—a decade ago, for example, we wrote a proposal related to software for particle accelerators used in physics projects. Our contact person on that project was very happy to have someone else deal with the DOE-related problems. Call us at 800.540.8906 ext. 1, or email us at seliger@seliger.com, to learn more. You write the software, and we’ll write the proposal. The division of labor can make your proposal process much easier—which is particularly useful when there are hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars at stake.
One question about the real purpose of this FOA comes from the eligibility statement, which says: “Each institution in such a team must be a small business. Each institution may include one or more academic or lab partners as subcontractors.” So it may be that many applicants for for this grant will be “businesses” that are in the nominal small “business” of high-performance computer software. My impression is that most high-performance computing (HPC) softare gets written by professors or grad students in academia or academia-adjacent organizations, or by giant companies like Google and Microsoft. Maybe some is written by small firms and startups, but I’m unaware of them. The world, however, is a big place, and some of those startups might have slipped past me.
Meanwhile, some large percent of the grant will be used as a subcontract to an academic lab or partner. The actual employees of the business will also be grad students, postdocs, or professors, who are (of course) devoted to the business itself, but who might also be working at the academic lab or university. Such an approach would be contrary to the spirit of SBIRs and STTRs but in accordance, from what I can tell, with the letter of the law—or the letter of the FOA, in the case of the AST application. We regularly help clients figure out what’s really going in FOAs, and the AST FOAs are no exception.
