House marks up HPC bill today

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The House Science and Technology Committee is meeting today (10 a.m. Eastern) to mark up (among others) the HPC R&D Act. This bill is the descendant of the High Performance Computing and Communications Act of 1991 which established the Networking and Information Technology Research and Development program.

From the CRA’s excellent coverage:

This version differs from the most recent attempt (H.R. 28, introduced in the 109th Congress) in that it doesn’t attempt to authorize specific agency activities. But otherwise, it contains the two provisions we particularly liked about the previous version. First, it directs the Director of the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy to develop and maintain a research, development, and deployment roadmap for the provision of federal high-performance computing systems. Second, there’s an explicit requirement that the President’s advisory committee for IT (now a responsibility of the PCAST) review not only the goals of the NITRD program but the funding levels as well and report the results of that review to Congress every two years.

Don’t get your hopes up though; previous Congresses have failed to act on a variety of HPC bills in recent years. The markup session will be webcast; link here.