Better Scientific Software Fellowship Program

Addressing the scientific software challenges facing the nation requires broad collaboration to foster practices, processes, and tools to improve software developer productivity and software sustainability. Both of those are key aspects of ensuring the integrity of computational results and increasing scientific productivity. The Better Scientific Software (BSSw) Fellowship Program, launched in 2018 with support from the U.S.

Department of Energy (DOE), provides recognition and funding for leaders and advocates of high-quality scientific software. This project will enable NSF to collaborate in sponsorship of the BSSw Fellowship Program and participate in managing the program. The project will be piloted in the current year with NSF support of one BSSw Fellow and one Honorable Mention, with the goal of expanding in future years to 2 or more BSSw Fellows and Honorable Mentions.

The BSSw fellow will receive a stipend that can be used for various activities that promote improved scientific software, such as organizing a workshop or creating a tutorial. Both the BSSw fellow and the honorable mention receive travel support to work with scientific community members and form a cohort.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) and DOE are leaders in advanced computing, pushing the growth of computational and data-enabled science and engineering as an essential driver of scientific and technological progress. Moreover, NSF and DOE researchers have developed a wide range of high-impact scientific software for advanced modeling, simulation, discovery, and analysis.

The country faces a software crisis, however, due to disruptive changes in computer architectures and increasing complexity in next-generation computational science. NSF partnership in sponsoring the BSSw Fellowship Program will enable a more robust approach toward pioneering the future of advanced computing ecosystems in support of American leadership in science and engineering.

An important element of the project is exploring the feasibility to expand the program to more fully address the NSF scientific community. The BSSw Fellowship Program enhances workforce development and pathways to the NSF and DOE software communities, though nurturing a network of people who advance software practices as a fundamental aspect of increasing overall scientific productivity.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.