COMPETES out of subcommittee, a look at HPC in the draft bill

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House Committee on Science and Technology Chairman Bart Gordon announced late last week that the subcommittees have finished their preliminary work and H.R.5116, the America COMPETES Reauthorization Act of 2010, has made it to the full committee. I’ll remind those of you that are non-US (or civics-impaired) that this is just the first step of our long legislative process. But, for what it’s worth, here are the HPC items that jumped out at me.

Most of the HPC goodness appears to be in Title VI, Department of Energy. In addition to the usual activities and reporting a few items related to HPC caught my eye in the text

SEC. 606. ADVANCED SCIENTIFIC COMPUTING RESEARCH PROGRAM.

(d)(2) EXASCALE COMPUTING.—At least 18 months prior to the initiation of construction or installation of any exascale-class computing facility, the Secretary shall transmit a plan to the Congress detailing the proposed facility’s cost projections and capabilities to significantly accelerate the development of new energy technologies.

(e) APPLIED MATHEMATICS AND SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT FOR HIGH-END COMPUTING SYSTEMS. The Director shall carry out activities to develop, test, and support mathematics, models, and algorithms for complex systems, as well as programming environments, tools, languages, and operating systems for high-end computing 3    systems (as defined in section 2 of the Department of Energy High-End Computing Revitalization Act of 2004 (15 5 U.S.C. 5541)).

Section 611 has the appropriations and authorizations for this bill, but there’s probably no real point in listing them out here since we still have to get through the Senate and then conference. I will note that the DOE’s Advanced Scientific Computing Research Program is to slated to get $2,861,000,000 to support the other directed activities in the bill.

There is also an interesting item that directs DOE to help get HPC out into industry

(g) OUTREACH. The Director shall conduct outreach programs and may form partnerships to increase the use of and access to high-performance computing modeling and simulation capabilities by industry, including manufacturers.

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