Investigators worldwide are eligible to submit a General Investigator proposal in response to the Roman Space Telescope Cycle 1 Call for Proposals. The Roman Science Support Center (SSC) will manage NASA funding awarded to investigators affiliated with U.S.-based institutions, subject to availability and the limitations cited below, to support General Investigator programs selected in Cycle 1.

Funding Support

The SSC will manage financial support for Cycle 1 investigators, subject to the availability of NASA funds and the eligibility guidelines described below. Investigators affiliated with U.S.-based institutions, regardless of nationality, are eligible for funding support. Investigators may be affiliated with educational institutions, non-profit non-academic organizations, industry, NASA centers and other government agencies.

The funding levels are determined by the proposed category; see Proposal Categories and Types for more details on the breakdown of the small, medium, and large categories. The justification for and associated work plan for each investigator receiving funding support must be specified in an anonymized fashion in the implementation plan of the proposal. Detailed, institutionally endorsed budgets are not required with the proposal. 

NASA cannot award research funds to investigators affiliated with non-U.S. institutions. While non-U.S. based Co-Is are permitted on all the Roman proposals, no NASA funds may flow to foreign institutions through the PIs. Therefore, researchers affiliated with non-U.S. institutions that propose investigations with Roman should seek support through their own appropriate funding agencies. Foreign PIs could indicate at least one U.S.-based co-PI for the purpose of administrating NASA funds. 

The SSC will manage Roman research funds and will contract with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) to administer the disbursement of the funds. The research funding instrument will be Research Support Agreements (RSA). An RSA is a fixed price, advance paid subcontract issued through JPL that is solely used for basic research. We plan to issue the fully funded RSAs with up to a 3-year period of performance. No-cost extensions beyond three years from the start are generally not offered. At the end of performance, RSAs require a Final Report deliverable outlining the work completed and listing publications from the research. An RSA must not involve International Traffic in Arms and Export Administration Regulations export-controlled information. 

Compute Support

The peta-byte scale volume of data that will be produced by Roman requires compute resources for research and analysis that are beyond those typically available in personal computers. The SOC has developed the cloud-based Roman Research Nexus (RRN; see below for more details) to provide a rich computing environment for analysis and visualization of Roman data, as well as any data relevant to Roman. The RRN is open to all researchers, not just to those with funded Roman programs. Proposers are required to estimate the compute resources they will need on the RRN and indicate in which credit bin they fall (see below for more details).

For investigations that require compute resources beyond the scope of the RRN, the Roman Project will consider providing access to Project funded time on the NASA Science Managed Cloud Environment (SMCE). Investigations in this scenario should discuss in their implementation plan why the RRN is insufficient for the proposed project, and the Project Office will reach out regarding the use of SMCE upon acceptance of the proposal.

Additionally, successful Roman proposers will be eligible to apply for NASA High-End Computing (HEC) time and/or can use any funds awarded to their program through this call to purchase compute resources from commercial vendors or institutional partners.

Overview and Nexus Resources

The Roman Research Nexus (RRN) is a cloud-based science platform created by the SOC that provides the community with a rich computing environment to allow low-barrier access to data, compute, and software resources. The RRN is a deployment of the JupyterLab environment on Amazon Web Services, offering access to Roman data, SOC and SSC-supported software, Jupyter Notebook Tutorials, training and documentation, and collaboration, file, and resource sharing within teams.

All Roman approved programs will receive RRN credits. Each approved program will receive the same initial credit allocation with the ability to request more credits periodically, up to a maximum value.

For Cycle 1 the SOC anticipates being able to support each approved program with an initial allocation of 500 credits, with the possibility to request more credits up to a maximum of 4000 credits total, pending NASA funding availability. Proposers are required to indicate in the proposal their requested Nexus Resource Bin based on their estimated credit need (see below). 

Nexus Credit Resource Bins

Proposers will need to justify in the proposal implementation plan the credits needed and explain how the calculations were performed to reach their needed credit value bin (more information below).

It is expected that approved programs needing more than 10,000 credits will not be accommodated in the Roman Research Nexus and will need to use an alternative computing environment (e.g. High-Performance Computing or SMCE).

Determining Nexus Credit Needs

For most data analyses on the Nexus, the major components contributing to the cost are compute, storage, and egress.

The table below lists the specifications of the servers that are planned to be available to Nexus users during Cycle 1 and estimates the credit usage for a couple of examples – running each of the servers consecutively for 24 hours, or for example using 1000 hours of compute to run a job across all the virtual CPUs available on each server.

Compute

The table below includes the storage types that are planned to be available on the Nexus. The storage associated with Elastic File System (EFS) is typically expensive, particularly for data that is accessed frequently. Whenever possible users are encouraged to use Simple Storage Service (S3) storage for their work.

Storage

Egress

While ingesting data to the Nexus is free, egressing data to the internet has a cost of 84 credits per 1 TB of data.

Examples of Credit usage for Specific Science Analyses

To help proposers determine in which credit usage bin they fall, the number of credits required to perform some typical analysis tasks have been estimated and will be made available on RDox - stay tuned for Late Breaking News.