Multidisciplinary teams of computational scientists and disciplinary specialists from one or more 

 Federal agencies and from industry and academia are working together to address these problems. 

 Many of these Grand Challenges projects are cofunded and cosponsored by industry. 



Significant progress has already been made toward solving many of these problems, and is expected to 

 continue as the Program progresses. These new computational approaches are already being incorpo- 

 rated by industry into new products, services, and industrial processes such as testing and manufactur- 

 ing. 



II. Software Components and Tools 



A complete collection of software components and tools is essential for a mature scalable parallel 

 computing environment that supports portable software. These software components and tools must 

 include standard higher level languages; advanced compilers; tools for performance measurement, 

 optimization and parallelization, debugging and analysis; visualization capabilities; and interoperabili- 

 ty and data management protocols. 



As scalable parallel computing extends to a distributed computing environment, greater demands will 

 be made upon the advanced network technologies developed and deployed through the NREN compo- 

 nent. Operating systems and database management software for heterogeneous configurations of 

 workstations and high performance servers will be developed along with remote procedure calls and 

 interprocess communication protocols to support gigabit per second interconnections. 



Broad industry involvement will be promoted through the identification and development of system 

 structures using open interfaces. Industry involvement will also increase as computational approaches 

 become available for more problem domains and more individuals are trained in high performance 

 computing. 



III. Computational Techniques 



Portable scalable software libraries are being developed to enable software to move across different 

 computational platforms and from one generation to the next. The performance and generality of the 

 new computing technologies will be evaluated using a variety of experimental applications. Standard 

 systems-level tools will be developed to support visualization of data and processes. 



IV. High Performance Computing Research Centers (HPCRC) 



The HPCRCs will deploy prototype large scale parallel computing facilities accessible over the 

 Internet through the integration of advanced and innovative computing architectures (both hardware 

 and software). Computational scientists working on Grand Challenge applications, software compo- 

 nents and tools, and computational techniques will be able to access the largest advanced systems 

 available in order to conduct a wide spectrum of experiments and scalability studies. Through the 

 HPCRCs, the HPCC Program will evaluate prototype system and subsystem interfaces, protocols, 

 advanced prototypes of hierarchical storage subsystems, and high performance visualization facilities. 

 This work is done in cooperation with the Evaluation of Early Systems element of the HPCS compo- 

 nent. 



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