Collaborative Research: Frameworks: Cloud Conversations: AI-Augmented Interfaces to Research Infrastructure

NSF Award Search · 01002627DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT · $149,588 · view on nsf.gov ↗

Abstract

Cloud computing is essential to a growing number of science use cases, but configuring scientific environments for deployment in the cloud can be challenging given that it often requires specialized knowledge in system administration, networking, security, and involves numerous configuration settings. Furthermore, many scientific workloads depend on tightly coupled virtual clusters, specialized hardware, fast interconnects, accelerators, and custom drivers. Managing this complexity consumes valuable time and attention that researchers could otherwise devote to science. This project develops an AI-based conversational assistant for configuring scientific computing environments that lets researchers describe what they need in everyday language and then creates the environment and verifies its integrity on shared research cloud infrastructure. The benefits of this approach range from increasing scientific productivity and lowering the cost of using cloud computing to enabling practical reproducibility of computational experimentation. The project designs and deploys an AI-based agent framework that can plan, provision, and validate scientific computing environments on open research computing infrastructure, such as Chameleon and Jetstream2. The framework combines large language models running on open, high-performance academic hardware with a set of software tools exposed through standard interfaces that include cloud-based services for resource provisioning, hardware and so

Key facts

NSF award ID
2609117
Awardee
Indiana University (IN)
SAM.gov UEI
YH86RTW2YVJ4
PI
David Y Hancock
Primary program
01002627DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT
All programs
Artificial Intelligence (AI), Software Institutes
Estimated total
$149,588
Funds obligated
$149,588
Transaction type
Standard Grant
Period
10/01/2026 → 09/30/2029