Figure 3: Grand Challenge Applications. Some major applications that will be enabled by parallel supercomputers.
The President instituted, in 1992, the five-year federal High Performance Computing and Communications Initiative. This has spurred the development of the technology described above and was initially focused on the solution of grand challenges shown in Figure 3. These are fundamental problems in science and engineering, with broad economic and scientific impact, whose solution could be advanced by applying high performance computing techniques and resources.
Figure 3: Grand Challenge Applications. Some major applications that
will be enabled by parallel supercomputers.
The activities of several federal agencies have been coordinated in this initiative. ARPA is developing the basic technology, which are applied to the grand challenges by DOE, NASA, NSF, NIH, EPA, and NOAA. Many of these agencies are also playing a critical role in technology development, while DoD has initiated a major computer modernization program to integrate HPCC technology into their infrastructure. Selected activities include the mapping of the human genome in DOE, climate modeling in DOE and NOAA, coupled structural and airflow simulations of advanced powered lift, and a high-speed civil transport by NASA.
The successes with grand challenges are well documented in the Federal 1996 ``blue book'', which is available on the Web. However, much attention has shifted recently to a set of companion problems---the so called National Challenges---which emphasize large scale information processing and distributed systems. These areas include digital libraries, health care, education, manufacturing, and crisis management, and we expect comparable major impact from the use of HPCC technologies, even though raw number-crunching performance will not be the critical issue.