Coordination Among Agencies

The participating agencies cooperate extensively in their efforts toward accomplishing HPCC Program goals, in part through the management vehicles described earlier and through the use of HPCC products from those other agencies wherever feasible. There are many other collaborations, including:

• Evaluation of early systems -- these systems are procured primarily by NSF, DOE, and NASA; together with NIH, NSA, NOAA, and EPA, they are evaluated for mission-specific computational and information processing applications.

• DOE and NASA are coordinating testbed development to ensure that a diverse set of computing systems are evaluated.

• NIST is developing guidelines for measuring system performance, performance measurement tools, and software needed to monitor and improve the performance of advanced computing systems at HPCC-sponsored high performance computing centers.

• The gigabit testbeds (described in the NREN section).

• High speed networking experiments -- ARPA, NASA, and NSA collaborate.

• Network security -- ARPA, NSA, NIST, and other agencies collaborate.

• The NSF Supercomputer Centers. Other agencies jointly support and use these environments for their own missions and constituencies. One example is the NIH Biomedical Research Technology program in biomedical computing applications.

• The Concurrent SuperComputing Consortium (described in the ASTA section).

• The National Consortium for High Performance Computing established by ARPA in cooperation with NSF (described in the ASTA section).

• The High Performance Software Sharing Exchange uses ARPA's wide area file system, NASA's distributed access to electronic data, and software repositories from DOE and NIST. These repositories are accessed by the other agencies.

• Joint agency workshops (for example, the recent "Workshop and Conference on Grand Challenge Applications and Software Technology").

• Representation on research proposal review panels (for example, DOE uses other agency experts in its Grand Challenge Review Committee).

Next section

Previous section

Blue Book Table of Contents

NCO/HPCC Home Page