The Federal High Performance Computing and Communications (HPCC) Program was created to accelerate the development of future generations of high performance computers and networks and the use of these resources in the Federal government and throughout the American economy.
In the early 1980s American scientists, engineers, and leaders in government and industry recognized that advanced computer and communications technologies could provide vast benefits throughout not just the research community but the entire U.S. economy. Senior government, industry, and academic scientists and managers initiated and are implementing the HPCC Program to extend U.S. leadership in these technologies and to apply them to areas of profound impact on and interest to the American people. The National High-Performance Computing Program was formally established following the passage of the High Performance Computing Act of 1991 (Public Law 102-194), introduced by then Senator Gore.
The scalable high performance computing systems, advanced high speed computer communications networks, and advanced software being developed in the HPCC Program are necessary for science and engineering and will contribute critical components of the National Information Infrastructure (NII). This infrastructure is essential to our national competitiveness. It will enable us to build digital libraries, enhance education and lifelong learning, manage our energy resources better, monitor and protect the environment, and improve health care, manufacturing, national security, and public access to government information.
The Program is planned, funded, and executed through the close cooperation of Federal agencies and laboratories, private industry, and academia. These efforts are directed toward ensuring that to the greatest extent possible the Program meets the needs of all communities involved and that its results are brought into the research and educational communities and into the commercial marketplace as effectively as possible.
The Program is well on its way toward meeting its original goals:
Users of the new scalable computing systems with their high performance on large problems and larger memories are able to address more complex, more realistic problems. We are beginning to understand our world better and to improve our lives:
- Improved modeling of the Earth and its atmosphere has sharpened our ability to predict the movement and characteristics of storms and other forms of severe weather. With improved forecasts, there will be more lives saved and an overall positive economic impact due to reduced property loss and evacuation of smaller endangered areas along the coast and elsewhere.
- New air and water quality models are enabling improved environmental decision making.
- Improvements in the design and manufacture of goods are yielding better products. Both the production processes and products such as cars and airplanes are becoming more energy efficient.
- We are learning more about how the human body functions and are improving our ability to diagnose and treat diseases.
In his State of the Union speech on January 24, 1994, President Clinton called for connecting every classroom, library, clinic, and hospital in America into a "national information superhighway" by the year 2000. He said, "Instant access to information will increase productivity. It will help educate our children. It will provide better medical care. It will create jobs." The HPCC Program is helping to fulfill this vision by developing much of the underlying technology for the NII, enabling the development of National Challenge applications, and demonstrating a variety of pilot applications. National Challenges are fundamental applications that have broad and direct impact on the Nation's competitiveness and the well-being of its citizens, and that can benefit from the application of HPCC technologies and resources. They include crisis and emergency management, digital libraries, education and lifelong learning, electronic commerce, energy demand and supply management, environmental monitoring and waste minimization, health care, design of manufacturing processes and products, and public access to government information. Some of the early National Challenge applications, such as electronic commerce, will mature to become services in the NII, enabling a wider range of future National Challenge applications.
Pending Congressional legislation introduced in 1993 would formally expand the Program to include such responsibilities.
In FY 1994 the HPCC Program began expanding its technical scope to include enabling technologies to accelerate the development of a National Information Infrastructure. The fundamentally advantageous technical properties of scalable high performance computing and communications make HPCC technologies critical for the National Information Infrastructure.
The capabilities being developed under the HPCC Program provide much of the technology base critically needed for the National Information Infrastructure:
- The microprocessors at the heart of today's most powerful scalable parallel computers appear in relatively inexpensive desktop workstations and personal computers today and will be found in the information appliances in the homes of tomorrow.
- The same technology that provides high speed connectivity between computer processors and memory can be used to build switches for the NII's high speed networks.
- The same client/server technology used to supply data from remote computers to Grand Challenge computations can be used to disseminate information to American households.
- NII applications such as the entertainment industry's "video on demand" will soon use the scalable parallel computing and mass storage systems that have long been part of high performance computing research centers.
- Improving health care requires biomedical research (such as improved molecular design of drugs).
- Improved environmental monitoring requires computationally intensive environmental models.
- Effective response to natural and man-made disasters depends on weather forecasting and environmental models.
- Developing advanced methods for product and process design and manufacturing requires numerically-intensive prototyping of those products and processes.
- The "information" in the National Information Infrastructure will include the data used by and the results from Grand Challenge research.
The NII places additional demands on HPCC research and development. Scalability issues must be addressed -- the technologies used to serve thousands of researchers and educators must be scaled up to serve millions of NII users. With the larger number of NII users and their greater diversity of interests and skills, more ubiquitous alternative "on-ramps" to the emerging high bandwidth networks of the NII must be examined. For example, at the Monte Vista High School in Cupertino, CA, Vice President Gore visited a class of students who were directly accessing the Internet over the local cable TV system. This technology was developed under HPCC sponsorship.
New services are being developed to support multimedia applications, digital libraries technologies, appropriate privacy and security protection, and increasingly higher levels of performance. Software development environments and building blocks for interfacing humans and computers must be created. These new tools will enable application developers to construct complex, large-scale, network-based, user-friendly, and information-intensive applications. These technologies provide the foundation upon which National Challenge applications will be developed.
The HPCC Program reports to the Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy. At his direction, budget oversight is provided by the National Science and Technology Council through its Committee on Information and Communication. The Program is managed by the High Performance Computing, Communications, and Information Technology Subcommittee. The National Coordination Office (NCO) for High Performance Computing and Communications completed its first year of operation in September 1993. During that year, it held more than 50 meetings with representatives from the U.S. Congress, state and local governments, foreign governments, industry, and universities.
HPCC Program agencies work closely with other government agencies, industry, and academia in developing, supporting, and using HPCC and other NII-associated technologies. The NCO and HPCC Program agencies work with members of the Information Infrastructure Task Force in addressing NII policy issues, and with other Federal agencies involved in helping schools, libraries, and medical facilities become part of the NII. Industrial, academic, and professional societies also provide critical analyses of the HPCC Program through conferences, workshops, and reports. Through these efforts, Program goals and accomplishments are better understood and Program planning and management are strengthened.
The 10 agencies that participate in the HPCC Program are:
Through coordinated planning and research and development, these agencies are developing an integrated infrastructure of HPCC and NII technologies. No individual agency has either the mission or the expertise to develop all components of the infrastructure, but each plays a necessary and unique role in the overall program.
The HPCC Program is organized into five components with the following key aspects: