The project involves four universities and a total of seven university departments as well as international collaborators. Beyond the seven university departments, there are partnerships with institutions from local schools to international research collaborations. The tasks include physics research, networking and infrastructure development, education and outreach (at several levels from graduate studies to secondary school education). The integration of all of these efforts requires the project to incorporate a detailed management plan.

The project will have a seven-member internal board of directors, comprised of the six project PI s as well as one additional member of the project. The intent is to represent each of the groups involved in the different aspects of the project. The additional member of the project will rotate yearly from the different groups, with Laird Kramer of the FIU Physics Department serving as the seventh director in the first year. The board of directors is responsible for providing the technical leadership as well as coordinating the activities with each other.

The board of directors will be assisted by an external advisory committee. The committee will be comprised of subject experts selected to provide strategic guidance in the areas of CMS physics, networking, international collaborative work and education and outreach. The project expects to form this board from members of the CMS collaboration leadership, the iVDGL and GriPhyN projects, the UERJ in Brazil, the QuarkNet project and local secondary educational institutes such as high schools.

The proposal integrates research in high energy physics with a variety of existing projects. The project builds on existing work in the areas of Education and Outreach, QuarkNet, the Modeling Instruction Program of David Hestenes, the Math Science and Technology Programs for teachers, high school and middle school students in the FIU College of Education. The programs which include the Partnership in Academic Communities, formerly funded by the NSF, and Enhancing Minority Opportunities to Teach in Middle Schools and Mathematics, Science and Technology Achievement programs, both funded by the NASA and in partnership with AmeriCorp and the Miami-Dade County Public Schools.

In the areas of physics, the project expands on the intermediate energy physics Jefferson Lab-based research of the FIU group and the existing high energy physics research of the CalTech, UF and FSU groups.

In the areas of computer information science and advanced networking infrastructure, the project is leveraging the AMPATH, iVDGL and GriPhyN projects funded by the NSF and DOE.

The parallel nature of the activities in the project lend themselves to the scheduling of milestones easily. In the CMS Physics research, the first milestone is the presentation to the CMS collaboration board on December 6, 2002, followed by final approval at the next collaboration board meeting (February 24-28 2003 during CMS week). After joining the collaboration, upon grant approval another logical milestone would be setup of the equipment necessary for the collaboration work, e.g., to write a GUI for controlling the high voltage it would first be necessary to purchase licenses for the PVSS database. Six months after that (1 year after the grant starts), a reasonable milestone would be a working GUI, that successfully can control the HV in a module located on the same network. Additonal controls (refinements, additional devices) would be a straightforward extension over the remainder of the initial grant period.

Infrastructure milestones include establishing a GigE connection to StarLight and a GigE connection to UERJ Rio de Janeiro, Brazil both in the second quarter of Y1 of the grant, a Tier-3 stack at the NAP in the third quarter of grant year 1, and bringing an inter-regional grid on-line between FIU, UF, FSU and UERJ in the fourth quarter of year 1.

The educational and outreach activities section (C6) has the milestones broken down in detailed fashion for the various activities. For the sake of brevity the milestones are not repeated here.