3. 5. National Challenges

National Challenges are information-intensive applications that have broad and direct impact on the Nation's well-being and competitiveness. The IITA program activity will support the use and integration of component technologies developed in other parts of HPCC to seek solutions for such applications. It will run the gamut of projects and programs ranging from concept demonstrations and experimental testbeds to the actual delivery of application systems in specific domains.

• Digital Libraries: This subelement includes work in both technologies and applications which will lead to significant advances in the generation, storage and use of digital information of different kinds across high speed networks. A digital library is a knowledge center without walls, open 24 hours a day and accessible by way of a network. Research areas range from advanced mass storage, on-line capture of multimedia data, intelligent filtering, knowledge navigation, effective user interfaces, system integration, and prototype and technology demonstration.

• Electronic Commerce: Electronic commerce integrates communications, data management, and security services, to allow business applications within different organizations to automatically interchange information. Communications services transfer the information from the originator to the recipient. Data management services define the interchange format of the information. Security services authenticate the source of information, verify the integrity of the information received by the recipient, prevent disclosure of the information to unauthorized users, and verify that the information was received by the intended recipient. Electronic commerce applies and integrates these infrastructure services to support business and commercial applications including financial transactions such as electronic bidding, ordering and payments, and exchange of digital product specifications and design data.

• Advanced Manufacturing: This subelement supports work in advancing manufacturing technologies through the use of HPCC capabilities in design, production, planning and quality control, marketing and user services. Research areas include concurrent engineering, protocols for electronic exchange of product data, and virtual design technologies. The IITA focus will be on testbeds and technology demonstration on the Internet.

• Education, Training, and Lifelong Learning: The subelement supports work in making high performance computing and communications capabilities a major universal resource for the Nation's education, training, and learning systems at all levels and in all environments. Areas of work include innovations in providing network access and conducting pilot projects that demonstrate computing and communications technologies for improving learning/training that can be scaled up.

• Health Care: This subelement supports work in developing the concepts and technologies for applications of HPCC in the health sector. Such applications make use of high speed networking capabilities for linking health care resources of all kinds to support research and shared care delivery. It also supports novel use of emerging technologies, e.g., visualization, virtual reality, 3D imaging, and multimedia databases. The IITA focus will be on the use of networking and other HPCC capabilities in medicine and health care delivery.

• Crisis Management: Crisis management refers to the use of command, control, communications, and intelligence information systems to support decision makers in anticipating threats, formulating plans, and executing these plans through coordinated response. This subelement will support work in crisis management that deals with a variety of large-scale, time- critical, resource-limited problems, including nuclear monitoring, disaster operations, and riot control. The IITA focus will be the use and demonstration of ubiquitous information services and other HPCC technologies in dealing with crisis management.

• Energy Management: This subelement supports work in managing the Nation's energy resources -- supply and demand -- in an increasingly complex global environment. The IITA focus will be the use of HPCC assets and capabilities to demonstrate ubiquitous benefits (e.g., energy savings) to the public from effective energy management.

• Government Information Delivery: The subelement supports work in implementing new programs to develop and apply high performance computing and high speed networking technologies to vastly improve public access to information generated by Federal, state, and local governments. Work includes projects to connect agency depository libraries and other sources of government information to the Internet to enable public access; and to demonstrate, test, and evaluate technologies to increase such access and effective use of government information. The IITA focus in the near term will be to provide cross agency technology demonstrations and in the long run to develop information delivery systems tailored to agencies.

• Environmental Monitoring: Environmental monitoring relates to our ability to observe, understand, and predict changes in the environment, both natural and man-made, on scales from seconds to millennia and from local to global. Efforts in this IITA National Challenge area will focus on applying high performance computing to advance environmental understanding and predictive capabilities, and on integrating multi-agency environmental observing systems (land-based, ocean-based, or satellite-borne) and historical databases using high speed networks. The NII will tie together environmental observing systems, computational resources, historical databases, libraries, scientists, forecasters, and all potential consumers of environmental information to support research, transportation, commerce, education, policy making, emergency preparedness, recreation, and day-to-day activities. This will provide ready access to the best possible, most up-to-date and comprehensive information needed to address the range of environmental questions, whether they be as mundane as "Will it rain this afternoon?" or as profound as "Is the ozone hole intensifying?"

• Other Category: NSF Discipline Network Centers. This subelement of NSF National Challenge activities focuses on the establishment of discipline applications centers in selected areas of the physical, biological, and geological sciences. It also includes the development of a network of discipline-specific networks. The new IITA emphasis is the use of the high speed network and high performance computers to enhance collaborative research among discipline scientists in both academia and industry.

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