7. Basic Research

Basic research projects focus on developing new methods to address fundamental limitations in HPCC technology as the Program proceeds and ensuring that the foundations for the next generation of HPCC technology are developed. Much of the advanced basic research is carried out in the academic community in cooperation with industry.

• ARPA funds basic research coupled to its other efforts in high performance computing. Basic research areas include design science, human/computer interaction, human language technology, persistent object bases, and software foundations. In addition, ARPA funds a high performance computing graduate fellowship program to focus attention on the critical need for people trained in this field.

• NSF funds long-term investigator-initiated research and continues to encourage interdisciplinary research, collaboration between computer scientists and applications scientists in solving Grand and National Challenges, and cross-sector partnerships. It funded 350 investigator- initiated projects and awarded 77 postdoctoral research and training grants (one grantee was a 1993 Supercomputing Forefront Award Winner). NSF-supported researchers contribute to fundamental networking, memory, interconnectivity, storage, and compiler technology, and the agency plans to support research in virtual reality. NSF, ARPA, and NASA jointly funded High Performance Fortran development.

• In FY 1995 NSF plans to support 100 new investigator-initiated projects in new areas, support 30 new postdoctoral fellows, and initiate three new programs -- graduate fellowship (20 awards initially), Industry/High Performance Computing Centers visitor program (16), and Software Infrastructure Capitalization (2).

• NSF also supports the procurement of scalable parallel systems for basic research and in FY 1995 will support infrastructure for National Challenges.

• DOE funds basic research at agency laboratories and at 30 universities including over 40 postdoctoral associates and over 60 graduate students. Subjects include numerical analysis and scientific computing, modeling and analysis of physical systems, dynamical systems theory and chaos, geometric and symbolic computation, and optimization theory and mathematical programming.

• NASA sustains research efforts in architeures, algorithms, networked distributed computing, numerical analysis, and in applications-specific algorithms. It has research institutes and centers of excellence at the Illinois Computer Laboratory for Aerospace Systems and Software, and at its Ames, Langley, and Goddard centers. It is expanding support for postdoctoral research, new professors, and its Graduate Student Researchers Program at NASA centers.

• NIH has formal degree-granting fellowships in medical informatics and cross-disciplinary training of established investigators. The agency sponsored hands-on training of biomedical researchers in using computational biology tools at NSF Supercomputer Centers.

• EPA supports cross training of computational and environmental scientists.

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