This week the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy released the Strategic Plan for the NSCI Initiative. As a whole-of-Nation effort to sustain and enhance U.S. leadership in high-performance computing, the NSCI seeks to accomplish five strategic objectives in a government collaboration with industry and academia:
- Accelerate the successful deployment and application of capable exascale computing
- Ensure that new technologies support coherence in data analytics as well assimulation and modeling
- Explore and accelerate new paths for future computing architectures and technologies, including digital computing and alternative computing paradigms
- Holistically expand capabilities and capacity of a robust and enduring HPC ecosystem
- Establish an enduring public-private collaboration to ensure shared benefit across government, academia, and industry
The NSCI strives to establish and support a collaborative ecosystem in strategic computing that will support scientific discovery and economic drivers for the 21st century, and that will not naturally evolve from current commercial activity,” writes Altaf Carim, William Polk, and Erin Szulman from the OSTP in a blog post.
The NSCO strategic plan frames a long-term strategy for achieving that vision. During FY 2016, agencies will implement the strategy through previously planned HPC research, development, and deployment activities. Agencies are also preparing for future activities that will support the principles and objectives of the NSCI. The President’s Budget for FY 2017 supports NSCI investments across the Federal Government, including key investments within DOE ($285 million) and NSF ($33 million).
New Actions Announced Today
Federal agencies are announced a new set of actions today that will further the objectives of the Initiative and engage the academic and industry sectors in support of NSCI. These steps include:
- NSF is establishing two multi-institutional Scientific Software Innovation Institutes that will develop sustainable community software platforms in support of NSCI. One institute, based at the University of California, San Diego will focus on supporting the development of advanced portals to democratize HPC access. The other institute at Virginia Tech will develop an end-to-end cyber ecosystem for the molecular sciences community.
- Today, the University of Maryland UMD and the U.S. Army Research Laboratory (ARL) announced a strategic partnership that enables the broad deployment of high-performance computing (HPC) resources and creates a national model of research collaboration. As part of ARL’s Open Campus Initiative, and in collaboration with DOD HPC Modernization Office, an ARL supercomputer will be made available to academia and private sector innovators through UMD’s Mid-Atlantic Crossroads (MAX) cyberinfrastructure for application development and networking experiments.
- Today, Federal agencies released a white paper describing the interagency vision for the emerging and innovative solutions needed to realize the Nanotechnology-Inspired Grand Challenge for Future Computing announced in October 2015. The white paper, a collaboration by the DOE, NSF, DOD, NIST, and the Intelligence Community, describes the interagency technical priorities, highlights the challenges and opportunities associated with these priorities, and presents a guiding vision for the research and development needed to achieve key technical goals for the challenge.
- DOE is announcing advances made in the design and development of its Exascale Computing Project (ECP). Achievement of this milestone is based on a year’s work following the signing of the EO, including formal inauguration of the ECP, calls for proposals for exascale hardware and software technologies, and identification of the first round of ECP applications software areas.
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