Based on a successful pilot study that utilized cyber infrastructure to organize and conduct science, CAWSES-II will create an International Virtual Institute. This institute will be organized around the principles that progress in system-level investigations requires: researchers committed to the value of pursuing science at the interface between disciplines, strongly-focused science topics that provide a common theme around which disciplines are able to interact, means of educating researchers about the key scientific issues in other disciplines and the connections between disciplines, access to scientific publications in other discipline areas, new forms of scholarly publishing, and the structure needed to bring researchers into contact with data sets, models, and each other, across disciplines and national boundaries.