Vision

21^st Century military superiority lies in the integration of information technologies throughout the DOD global infrastructure down to the level of the individual warfighter

Several fundamental changes are rapidly occurring in these underlying information technologies that will radically enhance the capability of the DOD to meet its mission

computing

single processor to parallel processors

knowledge space

user's hard disk to world wide web

mode of work

single user to collaborative virtual team

networking

low speed LAN to broad band national scale enterprise

human computer interface

text and image to immersive virtual environment and digital multimedia

supercomputers

stand alone machines to distributed scalable servers

science and engineering simulation

low resolution single physics, single scale models to high fidelity multi-physics and multi-scale optimizations

How can DOD deploy a global-scale world-class IT infrastructure to support R&D that can continually evolve to maintain state-of-the-art capabilities?

Integrated but distributed information infrastructure must be deployed

Production supercomputing capability needs to be brought in rapidly

New generation of HPC software must be developed to utilize new IT capabilities

Leveraging the state-of-the-art as it moves to the state-of-practice

Continuous awareness education and training of DOD community

DOD program components

DREN

MSRCs

DCs

CHSSI

PET

Why PET?

HPCMP goal: "Modernize the DOD R&D HPCC capacity and capability to a level equal to or above the foremost academic and industry research centers"-DDR&E

Synergy of academic and dod HPCC communities

technology transfer of academic innovation to DOD users

DOD problem solving drives academic innovation

Seeds for these technologies were sown by DOD thirty years ago, the early prototyping was done in universities, and the systems are now transitioning to industry. The PET program provides a highly leveraged method for transferring the academic experience base into the DOD mainstream.

Focus on enhancing user capabilities by effective use of new generation of scalable computers

Create an Interlinked National-Scale User Community

Enable Collaborative Virtual Teams to attack Mission Critical Problems

Objectives of this meeting

• Establish set of goals
• high-level goals
• level-2 objectives
• Methodology for identifying user and classifying targets
• Challenges
• Strategies for meeting goals
• infrastructure-related
• communication
• computation
• education
• culture-related
• process-related
• Recommendations

PET Program-wide Vision

• Meeting contractual obligations
• User community is aware of and has ready access to resources / methods enabling military successes
• High-impact point successes
• A specific user team accomplishes something viewed DOD-wide as a success
• e.g., ability to prevent one military disaster in future
• Basic research successes in key DOD areas
• General-diffusion successes
• Develop or enable an application that allows end-user group to solve significant problem
• Time frame for achieving many of these is years, not months

Program-wide User Base

• Short-term (quick success) targets
• Defense Grand Challenge
• Peer-reviewed proposals
• Some similar to NSF Grand Challenges; some very mission-specific
• Must use multiple MSRCs
• Must deliver within a year
• Other groups
• Projects interesting in and of themselves
• Projects likely to have widespread future impact
• Medium-term targets
• Establish infrastructure and training benefits
• CTAs
• Longer-term targets
• Spin-out benefits for general MSRC communities
• Need education, not just training or infrastructure

Impediments

• Infrastructure-related
• Serious gaps in computational infrastructure
• Culture-related
• No clear reward for users participating in educational activities
• Establish multi-university (joint) degree or certification programs for DOD users
• Seed the community to help itself
• ìActuarial approachî is the one that works best

Formalizing Program-wide Coordination

• … Andresís stuff describes overall purpose of committee
• … Our piece does the specific objectives and mechanisms for committee
• Establish academic PET executive committee
• Ken Kennedy, chair
• one (two?) rep for HBCU sites
• lead academic affiliates
• other major (in terms of responsibilities and funding) academic sites
• (for formal votes, each lead academic affiliate will have one vote)

Establish program-wide information base on user needs and resources for addressing needs (e.g., software, algorithms, architectures) and outcomes of PET activities

Observe and coordinate program as a whole, ensuring that overall direction is consistent with objectives of HPCMP and the specific MSRC contracts

• Move toward a common infrastructure to support the S&T community
• Ensure appropriate links to national HPCC community
• Identify structural impediments to progress and recommend ways to overcome or eliminate them
• Establish program-wide efforts
• identify areas of overlap and commonality
• identify opportunities for new program-wide activities or activities that should be phased out
• set up working groups to ensure integration and coordination where appropriate
• Monitor program-wide efforts
• ensure balance among affiliates and MSRCs
• arrange for resource pooling
• doument shared accomplishments
• publicize shared successes, giving credit to all four MSRCs as well as end users
• Meet regularly with representatives of the integrators, MSRCs, and CTAs

Program-wide Activities

• Ongoing activities
• Common Web document infrastructure (Baker/Coleman)
• Coordinated training (Southern/Turcotte)
• Electronic collaboration infrastructure (Ferguson/Turcotte)
• User profiling and analysis (Pancake/Blanchard)
• CTA-specific software repositories (Bernholdt/Grosh)
• How activities get adopted
• Approval sought on two coordinators (academic and government)
• Committee agrees that it is appropriate for program-wide involvement

Examples of Potential Program-wide Activities

• Scalable computing
• Metacomputing infrastructure
• CTA-specific software infrastructure
• Grid/geometry systems
• Discretization methods
• Solvers
• Virtual environments
• Data handling and analysis capabilities
• Multidisciplinary PSEs
• Enterprise-scale infrastructure
• Coordinated network connectivity (hardware and software enabling)
• MSRC-wide file transfer and sharing
• Software interoperability
• MSRC-wide software configuration management and improvement
• Education and training
• Web-based training infrastructure (HBCUs as beta sites)
• Scalable education program
• Joint postdoc and internship programs
• Problem-oriented knowledge base

Specialization Breakdown