The approximately 130 industrial affili- 

 ates and partners at the NSF 

 Supercomputer Centers fall into the 

 broad groups shown above. 



interdisciplinary environment. Currently about 130 non- 

 academic affiliates or partners represent many areas 

 including aerospace, automotive, financial, chemical 

 products, and telecommunications. The centers are 

 also engaged in software and systems development 

 with most of the major U.S. high performance computing 

 hardware vendors. 



Coordination of NSF activities with other agencies is an 

 integral feature of the program. This entails multiagency 

 planning activities leading to joint sponsorship of large 

 scale research and infrastructure projects, scientific con- 

 ferences and workshops, and development of shared 

 resources. 



NSF Activities by HPCC Program Component 



HPCS 



The HPCS component focuses on the design and devel- 

 opment of heterogeneous and distributed scalable paral- 

 lel computing systems to advance computational sci- 

 ence and engineering research capabilities. Included is 

 research on: systems architecture, including applica- 

 tion-specific systems and memory hierarchy; early pro- 

 totyping and evaluation of hardware and software sys- 

 tems; new tools for systems-level automated design and 

 prototyping; distributed design and intelligent manufac- 

 turing capabilities; and optical communications systems 

 and devices. 



NREN 



NSF is responsible for overall coordination of the NREN 

 component and the broad deployment of network infras- 

 tructure and services. NREN component activities sup- 

 port all aspects of the HPCC Program through connec- 

 tion of other agency networks, upgrading of the 

 NSFNET backbone network services, providing for 

 enhanced network security, increasing the number of 

 educational institutions connected to the network, and 

 serving as a primary source of information about access 

 to and use of the network. Activities focus on network 

 infrastructure and services and on gigabit research and 

 development. These activities are designed to develop 

 and implement a wide range of networking infrastructure 



65 



