Good Luck with your proposal submission !

We recognize that competition for grant awards is intense and there are a large number of requirements for almost all grant proposals these days. CCAST provides the following resources/services to aid in that process.

1. Proposal collaboration
2. Template NSF Facilities, Equipment and Other Resources text
3. Data Management Plan Assistance
4. Citation and Acknowledgement text for publications resulting from CCAST use
5. Resource/Service Cost estimates
6. Letter of Support

Proposal Collaboration

Assistance on research computing related text/plans is also available. Please see the text items listed below or contact CCAST support for other assistance.Facilities, Equipment and Other Resources template text

For proposals where an in-depth collaboration with CCAST is desired, please make contact with the CCAST Executive Director, Dane Skow, either directly at dane.skow@ndsu.edu or through the CCAST support email (support@ccast.ndsu.edu). 

A standard description of CCAST and (coming soon) NDSU/IT resources and services available to NDSU researchers is available on our faculty resources page. Proposal writers may include this text in any proposal. Requests for descriptions of other resources/services should be directed to CCAST support.

Data Management Plan Assistance

NDSU has partnered with the DMPtool collaboration to facilitate use of the web tool provided at www.dmptool.org for the creation of customized Data Management Plans tailored to the requirements of various funding agencies. Currently one can use this tool with one's NDSU login credentials and it will walk one through the major items required for the selected agency's Data Management Plans. In the near future, this tool will be pre-populated with template text describing resources/services available to NDSU researchers.

Note: this tool does NOT automatically generate an acceptable Data Management Plan on its own, it requires decisions and customization from each proposal writer. Ultimately the proposal writers will have to construct a viable plan using the provided text and their own data management intentions/decisions. The tool merely provides a template and guide to help write plans acceptable to funding agencies.

NB: The current ruling is that expenses for services after the period of performance are not allowable charges against grants (federal or ND). This means, for example, that fees for data storage after the term of an award is, by default, not allowable. The best advice we have been given is for PIs who wish to pay for long term curation of research data to ask permission to pay for long term leases from the funding agency in the Data Management Plan. This seems an unsustainable solution, but it's the best offered at the moment.

NSF Facilities, Equipment and Other Resources Template

We have created a Template with information people can use for filling out an NSF Facilities, Equipment and Other Resources document. In most cases, this should be expanded to include Department and College resources, but it contains information about CCAST resources available to any NDSU PI.

Citation and Acknowledgement text 

For work done on CCAST resources prior to October 1, 2018, researchers are requested to acknowledge CCAST using the following text (or a close variant citing the DOE grant):

Computing services, financial and administrative support from the North Dakota State University Center for Computationally Assisted Science and Technology and the Department of Energy through Grant No. DE-SC0001717 are gratefully acknowledged.

For work done on CCAST resources since October 1, 2018, researchers are requested to acknowledge CCAST using the following text:

Computing services, financial and administrative support from the North Dakota State University Center for Computationally Assisted Science and Technology is gratefully acknowledged.

Resource/Service Cost Estimates

CCAST resources are available free of charge to all NDSU researchers at a basic, fair share resource sharing level described at https://www.ccast.ndsu.edu/resources/ccast-project-resources/. Costs for standard services beyond this basic level or with a more deterministic availability schedule are also described in the table at that website.

Cost estimates for services/resources not described in the CCAST standard service catalog are available by request to the CCAST Executive Director.

Letter of Support/Collaboration

Letters of Support for proposals intending to use CCAST resources are available upon request to the CCAST Executive Director. Please allow 2 business days for the generation of a standard letter of support. More customized letters should be discussed with the CCAST Executive Director as early as possible.

CCAST is interested in collaborating on proposals which would advance the state of the art in research computing, particularly at NDSU. We are happy to contribute text and ideas to the proposal writing process in those cases, but, please don't write CCAST in as a collaborator without talking with us first ;-) ! Contact the CCAST Executive Director to start a collaboration discussion.