Federally supported High End Computing and Computation (HECC) programs conduct leading-edge research and development (R&D) in large, high performance computational systems, including hardware, software, architecture, and applications. HECC R&D extends the state of the art in computing systems, applications, and high end infrastructure to achieve the scientific, technical, and information management breakthroughs necessary to keep the U.S. in the forefront of the 21st century information technology (IT) revolution.

Federal HECC research continues to pave the way for revolutionary advances in science, technology, and national security and has become an important tool in the design and development of military and commercial products ranging from submarines and aircraft to automobiles. HECC researchers develop computation-intensive algorithms and software to model and simulate complex physical, chemical, and biological systems; information-intensive science and engineering applications; management and use of huge, complex information bases; and advanced concepts in quantum, biological, and optical computing.

HECC research continues to have substantial economic benefits. The President's Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC) noted that many of the underlying component technologies in today's mid-level and desk-top computers and Internet communications devices were derived from yesterday's high end computers. Without the Federally funded, high-risk HECC research of past decades, today's personal computers, networks, and cell-phone infrastructures would not perform as well and U.S. economic growth would not be as robust.

Thus, the Federal HECC agenda is motivated by government, industrial, and scientific user applications demanding increasing levels of performance. Continuing U.S. leadership in critical areas of Federal agency mission responsibilities, such as national security, industrial production, and fundamental science, is at stake since they depend on U.S. leadership in high end computing. Areas of concern include:

• Modeling and simulation in biology, environmental sciences, materials sciences, and physics
• Data fusion and knowledge engineering demands of the new millennium across all elements of the national, scientific, and industrial sectors
• Complex and computationally intensive national security applications in weapons systems design and maintenance, cryptology, and battlespace dominance
• Industrial leadership in aerospace, automobile and other product design and manufacturing, energy, pharmaceutical, and chemical sectors
  
  The current aims of HECC are to:
  
  
• Improve the usability and effectiveness of teraflops-scale systems (that is, those that can perform on the order of 1012 to 1014 operations per second)
• Pursue leading-edge research for future generations of computing, such as petascale computers (1015 to 1017 operations per second) and exabyte storage systems (1018 to 1020 bytes of information storage), based on current and advanced device technologies and subsystem components and innovative architectures
• Demonstrate prototype systems

Accomplishing these objectives requires investments in systems-software and applications-software research as well as efforts at the various layers of hardware and architecture from the smallest components through entire systems.

The High End Computing and Computation Coordinating Group (HECCCG) coordinates the HECC program with the support of the National Coordination Office (NCO) for Computing, Information, and Communications (CIC). The HECCCG facilitates interagency collaborations, identifies HECC R&D needs, and provides mechanisms for Federal cooperation with Government laboratories, universities, industry, and other private-sector organizations or entities. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Department of Energy (DOE), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the National Security Agency (NSA), and the National Science Foundation (NSF) participate in the HECCCG.