Here is a draft summary of proposal. Please comment Please start fleshing out proposal with topics for sections A B C F G H L Please divide these into areas: HCI, Distributed Computing, Collaboration, Demonstrations, Management, Other Thank you! The Ultimate UltraScale Computer BA 98-11 A.{1} Innovative claims for the proposed research. This page is the centerpiece of the proposal and should succinctly describe the unique proposed contribution. B.{18} Technical rationale, technical approach and constructive plan for accomplishment of technical goals in support of innovative claims and deliverable products. C.{2} Deliverables associated with the proposed research. Include in this section all proprietary claims to results, prototypes, or systems supporting and/or necessary for the use of the research, results, and/or prototype. If there are no proprietary claims, this should be stated. The offeror must submit a separate list of all technical data or computer software that will be furnished to the Government with other than unlimited rights (see DFARS 227.) D.{3} Statement of Work (SOW) written in plain English, outlining the scope of the effort and citing specific tasks to be performed and specific contractor requirements. E.{1} Schedule of milestones for the proposed research. F.{2} Technology Transfer. Description of the transferable technology and expected technology transfer path. G.{3} Comparison with other ongoing research indicating advantages and disadvantages of the proposed effort. H.{4} List of key personnel, concise summary of their qualifications, and discussion of proposer's previous accomplishments and work in this or closely related research areas. Indicate the level of effort to be expended by each person during each contract year and other (current and proposed) major sources of support for them and/or commitments of their efforts. I.{1} Description of the facilities that would be used for the proposed effort. J.{5} Cost by task, with breakdown into accounting categories and equipment for the entire contract and for each contract year. Where the effort consists of multiple portions that could reasonably be partitioned for purposes of funding, these should be identified as contract options with separate cost estimates for each. Details of any cost sharing should also be included. Section B: Technical Rationale, Approach and Plan B1: Introduction New computers, communication and peripheral devices from biological, quantum, superconducting and other technologies promise localized UltraScale computing. However the potential world (and space) wide linkage of billions of such human constructed devices with a corresponding number of people (Nature's computer -the human mind) is surely the Ultimate UltraScale Computer (UUC). We do not envisage a glorified next generation World Wide Web as this implies that each client (human mind) links essentially independently to a single server in a given transaction. The World's Wisdom is obtained by the incoherent sum of individual contributions. Rather as in a parallel computer, our UUC will link billions of hybrid entities together to tackle a single problem. Here the collective Wisdom is obtained coherently by the simultaneous linkage of the individual computers. Thus the UUC delivers a capability that is greater than the simple sum of the parts. As a focus for this proposal and to show the defense relevance of our UUC, we have chosen crisis management as a demonstration application. This is typical of command and control and decision (judgment) support intrinsically mixing people and computers in real-time simultaneous interactions. This proposal is built on three key technologies where our team has world class capabilities. They will be scaled up and blended in this effort. The core efforts are in human computer interfaces (HCI), collaborative systems and distributed computing and we briefly discuss these separately in the following. The UUC HCI will be led by medical doctor David Warner and biophysicist Ed. Lipson and will aim at maximizing sensory throughput with novel hardware interfaces and software built on extension of the NeatTools system. Naturally linking an individual to so much real-time information requires both optimizing the amount and the level of understanding (quality of information) in the transferred data. New distributed computing techniques will be built on the Globus toolkit and led by Ian Foster from Argonne National Laboratory. This work includes the necessary new distributed data fusion to aggregate data to form the higher level information processed by the HCI. Globus is the leading world scale metacomputing activity and we will also get from the Globus team access to a large testbed for use in our demonstrations. Argonne and NPAC are already collaborating on the next generation National Grid metacomputing project of NCSA (National Computational Science Alliance) and we will leverage all this activity. In particular we will develop higher level web based computing on top of the Globus facilities by extending NPAC's (Wojtek Furmanski) WebFlow system. This is designed as a system integration tool but built using the pervasive technologies which is an essential characteristic if we are to scale the UUC to the ultimate size. Another key Web based subsystem and our third core building block is the collaboration capability that will support the synchronous sharing of information (in the form of distributed objects) between the participants in the UUC. Here we will build on NPAC's TangoInteractive system led by Marek Podgorny, which is not only a world- leading collaboration system but already has substantial support for our chosen demonstration area. Tango was originally built as a proof of concept that pervasive Web technologies could be used in Command and Control and now is part of the XII crisis management project led by Lois McCoy of the National Institute for Urban Search and Rescue. For each of our subsystems, a key theme will be scaling current ideas to eventually support billions of simultaneous entities. This scaling must take account not only of the issues of size but also the inevitable failures that will occur in a system of such magnitude. This scaling will involve subsystem dependent issues (for instance for HCI, we need to take advantage of multiple simultaneous human sensory subsystems ) but we will use a common system-level approach based on novel hierarchical multiresolution ideas to support integrated scaling for all three core technologies areas. In particular it is not feasible to deploy a billion entity demonstration as part of this proposal which after all is aimed at future capabilities. Rather we will demonstrate the hierarchical scaling through some four levels to a total of some 10,000 to 100,000 computers and minds. This implies a branching factor of around ten at each level of hierarchy but this will be refined as a result of this proposal from a study of the tradeoff between branching factor and number of hierarchical levels. We plan a set of demonstrations throughout the project with increasing size each time so as to support the critical scaling concepts. Note that it is essential to our plan that our software is universally runnable and that our HCI interfaces are both readily available (e.g. at Radio Shack) and very affordable so that our UUC can be widely deployed. We intend to use the standard Web mechanisms to popularize this project and so obtain volunteers to become the minds of our highly scaled UUC. We expect children to find this project particularly exciting and will use a set of collective (multi-player) games to interest them and complement the serious Crisis Management demonstrations. Our demonstrations will initially involve conventional computers but can be extended to use UUC systems, as these become available. J.{5} Cost by task Approximate Budget: $300K NPAC Integration Management WebFlow $225K MindTel (HCI) $175K Argonne (Globus) $150K WebWisdom.com (Tango)