Information Infrastructure Technology and Applications (IITA) activities will demonstrate feasible solutions to problems of national importance, such as health care or 21st century manufacturing, using the full potential of the Nation's rapidly evolving high performance communications and information processing capabilities.
The High Performance Computing and Communications (HPCC) Program will produce enabling technologies critical to developing the National Information Infrastructure. With the incorporation of IITA activities, the HPCC Program will advance intelligent system interfaces, real environments augmented with virtual environments, image understanding, language and speech understanding, intelligent agents aiding humans "in the loop," and next generation data and object bases for electronic libraries and commerce. This will be coupled with a vigorous program of testbed experimentation that will ensure the continued leadership of the United States in critical information processing technologies.
IITA efforts are designed to strengthen the HPCC technology base, broaden the markets for these technologies, and accelerate industry development of the NII. Federal HPCC agencies will work closely with industry and academia in pursuit of these objectives. This will be accomplished in part by accelerating the development of readily-accessible, widely used, large-scale applications with significant economic and social benefit. The HPCC Program's original focus of enhancing the Nation's computing and communications capabilities is thus extended to address a broader set of technologies and applications that have an immediate and direct impact on critical information capabilities affecting every individual in the Nation.
The development of such applications will be predicated on (1) creating the underlying scalable computing technologies for advanced communication services over diverse bitways, effective partitioning of applications across elements of the infrastructure, and other applications support services that can adapt to the capabilities of the available infrastructure; and (2) creating and inserting an intelligent service layer that will significantly broaden the base of computer information providers, developers, and consumers while reducing the existing barriers to accessing, developing, and using advanced computer services and applications. In parallel with these activities, a more effective software development paradigm and technology base will be developed. This will be founded on the principles of composition rather than construction, solid architectures rather than ad hoc styles, and more direct user involvement in all stages of the software life cycle. The entire technology base developed in this program, including services and software, will be leveraged across the National Challenges, leading to significant economies of scale in the development costs.
The underlying elements of the IITA program component consist of the following four broad topic areas:
Information Infrastructure Services
These are the collection of services provided to applications developers and end- users that implement a layered architecture of increasing levels of intelligence and sophistication on top of the communications bitways. Services provide a universally available, network-aware, adaptive interface upon which to construct the National Challenge applications, spanning communications-based services at the low end, to intelligent information processing services at the high end. These services include network support for ubiquitous access, resource discovery in a complex distributed network environment, and intelligent support services that can negotiate and adapt to the service quality needs of the application. Information Infrastructure Services also include system software and services that implement pervasive privacy, security and trust mechanisms for the information infrastructure, persistent object bases with which to build large-scale data repositories, reliable computing technologies to support the mission-critical nature of the infrastructure, and defensive software organized to protect the infrastructure from intrusion and attack.
Systems Development and Support Environments
This subprogram area consists of the enabling technologies to develop and support large, complex information systems that exploit a national-scale information infrastructure. Fundamental to the subprogram is the use of that infrastructure in the software development and support process. Virtual organizations consisting of end-users, contractors, and management will synergistically work together to develop software systems that are easy to use, that can be adapted through use to fit human needs and changing requirements, and that enhance end-user productivity, all in spite of the complexity of the underlying infrastructure. To achieve these goals, the program will focus on software architectures, component prototyping, software composition, libraries of reusable and reliable software modules, end-user tailoring, intelligent documentation and on-line help, machine learning, and scalable compiler and interpreter technology.
Intelligent Interfaces
Many of the National Challenge applications require complex interfacing with humans or intelligent control systems and sensors. In addition, these applications must be able to understand their environment and to react to them. This program area consists of high-level, network-capable applications building blocks for real- time planning and control, image processing and understanding, human language technology, extensive use of intelligent computer-based "agents," and support technologies for more effective human-computer interaction.
National Challenges
These are large-scale, distributed applications of high social and economic impact that have been identified as containing an extensive information-processing component and which could benefit greatly by building an underlying information infrastructure. Specific applications include Digital Libraries, Manufacturing, Education and Training, Health Care (Trauma Care, Medical Information Infrastructure), Environmental Monitoring, Crisis Management, and Government Information Delivery.
These elements are described in more detail in the following subsections.