Attachment 3 - Technical Capability Projects.xlsx

Technical Capability Area Defin

2. Apply efficient and effective agile project management principles to allow coordinating tasks and shifts in priorities in a multiple-organizational and multiple-stakeholder environment with competing interests, including:

(a) Ensure a high-rate of objectives completion and high-levels of business value.

(b) Establish a risk registry addressing change management and adapting to priority shifts.

(c) Coordinate tasks that involve multiple organizations across sectors, stakeholders and dependencies.

(d) Define success metrics for tracking objectives and business value, and engaging internal and external stakeholders.

(e) Establish a communications plan that addresses the need of consistent community and stakeholder engagement.

Software Infrastructure 1. Develop and maintain automated CI/CD pipelines, integrated with a public-facing, end-to-end testing and development environment;

2. Develop cloud-ready, platform-agnostic, inter-operable, portable solutions for community Earth System Models (ESMs), including containers, unified software stacks for ESMs, and infrastructure as code (IaC)

3. Provide software infrastructure integrated with high performance computing platforms and CI/CD pipelines to facilitate testing, evaluation and coordination of community model development and integration into the ESM code base;

4. Ensure all products and services are fully documented, including technical specifications, benchmarking results, and performance metrics.

5. Comply with Agency/Customer Organizational Information Technology policies and best practices;

6. Facilitate research to operations and operations to research (R2O2R) in the Weather, Water, and Climate enterprise.

Configuration Management 1. Manage ESM code repositories, including integration of alternative options of dynamical cores, physics packages, and Earth system components;

2. Exercise state-of-the art software architecture and engineering practices for software integration, including but not limited to, maintaining and improving unit, regression, cross-platform, and integration tests through a hierarchical test framework, integrating new tests, updating baselines, and resolving failures.

3. Coordinate code reviews, integrate pull requests, and deploy minimal workflow end-to-end (WE2E) tests;

4. Coordinate continuous integration teams and tools, including automated testing on supported computing platforms aligned with the software infrastructure.

5. Provide and maintain tools associated with code management, including ticketing, wikis, and proper documentation using open-source repositories.

6. Develop and support a data management framework that is findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable, in support of data needs for development, testing, and evaluation of the ESM modules, pre-procssing, data assimilation, post-processing, verification and validation, and visualization.

Systems Integration 1. Integrate modules, pre-procssing, data assimilation, post-processing, verification and validation, and visualization packages into ESM code, where applicable.

2. Align all ESM system integration activities with CI/CD pipelines and coordinate with community developers for supported applications and components.

3. Benchmark features to ensure forecast skill and computational performance, ensuring updates do not break functionality.

4. Deliver platform-agnostic, portable, end-to-end prototypes of ESM applications with optimized computational performance and integrated to public facing operational and/or research-oriented verification and validation packages to allow tracking of forecast skills;

5. Develop and release system architecture, and publish infrastructure documentation and software standards for supported codes and systems.

Community Release Planning, Coordination, and Support 1. Support and coordinate public releases of ESMs with clearly identified procedures, stakeholders, timelines, roles and responsibilities, and communication plans;

2. Support the technical aspects of the release process by ensuring thoroughly tested platform-agnostic ESM prototypes across on-premise, cloud, and limited (e.g., linux or MacOS) computing platforms;

3. Consolidate stakeholder inputs and summarize them in reports with recommendation for improving community infrastructure , releases and advanced user support activities;

4. Provide open-source code and associate datasets and containers (if applicable) in public-facing code repositories and data management platforms with appropriate open-source and open-development licenses;

5. Provide up-to-date user’s guidance and documentations as part of the releases.

Advanced User Support 1. Manage and continuously improve public-facing user support forums with clearly defined standard operating procedures;

2. Develop and maintain tutorials, instructional materials, and documentation.

3. Develop and host in-person training, tutorials, and hackathons in pubic-facing computing environments;

4. Support seamless user access to code repositories and public-facing computing environments for training on cloud and/or on-premise platforms;

5. Support all relevant model configurations, applications, and components;

6. Identify and maintain a database of subject matter experts (SMEs) to provide timely, informed user assistance;

7. Maintain and update frequently asked questions (FAQs) for ESMs;

8. Integrate user support services to program websites, wikis, and/or social media.

Community & Stakeholder Engagement 1. Leads coordination meetings between stakeholders, including meeting facilitation, conduct user surveys for identifying technical requirements, key metrics and/or standards;

2. Summarizes stakeholder inputs and provides recommendations for standards, policies, and processes to decision-making bodies;

3. Consolidate stakeholder inputs and summarize them in reports;

4. Provide opportunities/channels for incorporating stakeholder feedback into relevant on-going and future work items;

5. Support web-based artifacts (websites, wikis, portals, social media), including maintenance and content development for these artifacts in compliance in federal government regulations and best practices (e.g., Section 508 compliance, Privacy Protection Act, human-centered design, and Search-Engine Optimized);

6. Plan and host community meetings and workshops, including developing agendas, securing meeting venues, facilitating logistics for in-person and virtual participants, and drafting final workshop reports;

7. Coordinate and publish community newsletters to facilitate communication engagement artifacts;

8. Showcase program outcomes at conferences and through online channels.

9. Integrate engagement strategies, products, and services into web-based artifacts.

Support and develop Machine Learning (ML) and hybrid based Earth System Models (ESMs) 1. Develop an ML software architecture on cloud and on-premise platforms leveraging public-facing code repositories that enables community access to ML based ESMs, including initialization, training, fine-tuning, and visualization;

2. Integration of ML models with Physically-based ESMs;

3. Establish and optimize computational performance of training and/or near real-time workflows for ML-based ESMs;.

4. Support CI/CD pipelines for ML-based or hybrid ESMs .

TCP 1

For each technical capability area below, indicate the estimated number of annual full time equivalent personnel (FTEs) dedicated to that function (rounded to 1 decimal place). One annual FTE = 1,880 hours.

-For projects exceeding a year, the annual FTEs is the total level of effort divided by 1,880 hours, divided by the number of years of performance of that function.

-For projects less than a year, the annual FTEs is the total level of effort for performance of that function divided by 1,880 hours.

-If performance involved less than 0.1 annual FTEs (188 hours) in a technical capability area, enter 0.

For example: -a 6 month project with 940 total hours = 0.5 annual FTEs.

-a two-year project with 3,760 hours = 1 annual FTE.

-an 18 month project with 10,000 hours = 3.5 FTEs.

*If options were included in the award, but not exercised, and their period of validity is expired, do not include those options in the total value.

1305M323RNFFK0014 Attachment B - Pricing Schedule

TCP 2

For each technical capability area below, indicate the estimated number of annual full time equivalent personnel (FTEs) dedicated to that function (rounded to 1 decimal place). One annual FTE = 1,880 hours.

-For projects exceeding a year, the annual FTEs is the total level of effort divided by 1,880 hours, divided by the number of years of performance of that function.

-For projects less than a year, the annual FTEs is the total level of effort for performance of that function divided by 1,880 hours.

-If performance involved less than 0.1 annual FTEs (188 hours) in a technical capability area, enter 0.

For example: -a 6 month project with 940 total hours = 0.5 annual FTEs.

-a two-year project with 3,760 hours = 1 annual FTE.

-an 18 month project with 10,000 hours = 3.5 FTEs.

*If options were included in the award, but not exercised, and their period of validity is expired, do not include those options in the total value.

1305M323RNFFK0014 Attachment B - Pricing Schedule

TCP 3

For each technical capability area below, indicate the estimated number of annual full time equivalent personnel (FTEs) dedicated to that function (rounded to 1 decimal place). One annual FTE = 1,880 hours.

-For projects exceeding a year, the annual FTEs is the total level of effort divided by 1,880 hours, divided by the number of years of performance of that function.

-For projects less than a year, the annual FTEs is the total level of effort for performance of that function divided by 1,880 hours.

-If performance involved less than 0.1 annual FTEs (188 hours) in a technical capability area, enter 0.

For example: -a 6 month project with 940 total hours = 0.5 annual FTEs.

-a two-year project with 3,760 hours = 1 annual FTE.

-an 18 month project with 10,000 hours = 3.5 FTEs.

*If options were included in the award, but not exercised, and their period of validity is expired, do not include those options in the total value.

1305M323RNFFK0014 Attachment B - Pricing Schedule

TCP 4

For each technical capability area below, indicate the estimated number of annual full time equivalent personnel (FTEs) dedicated to that function (rounded to 1 decimal place). One annual FTE = 1,880 hours.

-For projects exceeding a year, the annual FTEs is the total level of effort divided by 1,880 hours, divided by the number of years of performance of that function.

-For projects less than a year, the annual FTEs is the total level of effort for performance of that function divided by 1,880 hours.

-If performance involved less than 0.1 annual FTEs (188 hours) in a technical capability area, enter 0.

For example: -a 6 month project with 940 total hours = 0.5 annual FTEs.

-a two-year project with 3,760 hours = 1 annual FTE.

-an 18 month project with 10,000 hours = 3.5 FTEs.

*If options were included in the award, but not exercised, and their period of validity is expired, do not include those options in the total value.

1305M323RNFFK0014 Attachment B - Pricing Schedule

TCP 5

For each technical capability area below, indicate the estimated number of annual full time equivalent personnel (FTEs) dedicated to that function (rounded to 1 decimal place). One annual FTE = 1,880 hours.

-For projects exceeding a year, the annual FTEs is the total level of effort divided by 1,880 hours, divided by the number of years of performance of that function.

-For projects less than a year, the annual FTEs is the total level of effort for performance of that function divided by 1,880 hours.

-If performance involved less than 0.1 annual FTEs (188 hours) in a technical capability area, enter 0.

For example: -a 6 month project with 940 total hours = 0.5 annual FTEs.

-a two-year project with 3,760 hours = 1 annual FTE.

-an 18 month project with 10,000 hours = 3.5 FTEs.

*If options were included in the award, but not exercised, and their period of validity is expired, do not include those options in the total value.

1305M323RNFFK0014 Attachment B - Pricing Schedule