PERFORMANCE HIGHLIGHTS 



GOAL: Enabling the U.S. to uphold a position of world leadership in all aspects of science, 

 mathematics, and engineering. 



Research Project Support: NSF investments in fundamental research activities provide support 

 for the cutting edge research that characterizes world leadership in many fields They help to 

 maintain the nations capacity to perform in science and engineering, particularly in the US 

 academic research enterprise 



• Parallel Computing Systems. Since the 1960s, NSF has supported research on various 

 aspects of parallel computing During the past 10 years the overall investment, which has 

 supported a broad range of related activities with impact well beyond parallel systems, has 

 totaled approximately $285 million As a result of this investment and the investments of other 

 agencies, there has been a paradigm shift from sequential systems with a single processor to 

 parallel systems consisting of from a few, to thousands of processors capable of executing 

 instructions simultaneously In addition to being the only form of computing capable of 

 addressing the high performance needs of the science and engineering research community, 

 parallel computing is also becoming increasingly pervasive in workstations and other less 

 powerful systems as a cost-effective alternative to sequential computing. 



• Polymers NSF invests about $45 million annually on basic research on polymers through 

 about 300 individual investigator grants and several centers. Past NSF support of basic 

 research has contributed substantially to the $300 billion per year US polymer industry It is 

 important to find cheaper and more benign solvents to replace toxic volatile organic solvents 

 for polymer synthesis In research supported jointly by NSF and EPA, an environmentally 

 benign method of polymer synthesis was discovered using liquid carbon dioxide This 

 research received one of Discover magazine's 1995 Awards for Technological Innovation, 

 and several chemical companies are supporting its development for commercial use Other 

 exciting work in polymers focuses on finding ways to use plastics in place of silicon as the 

 base material of microcircuits. NSF grantee Alan Heeger recently received the international 

 Balzan Prize for his work in the area of Science of New Materials, where Heeger and 

 collaborator Fred Wudl synthesized all-plastic light emitting diodes. 



• Genetic Code Two of the major challenges in biology are to determine the genetic blueprint 

 of organisms, as encoded in their DNA, and to decipher how this linear blueprint leads to the 

 complicated structure of biological molecules The Science and Technology Center for 

 Molecular Biotechnology, with $24 million from NSF over the past seven years, has developed 

 integrated tools and instruments to meet these challenges A distinguishing feature of the 

 Center's research is that it focuses the most powerful methods from chemistry, computer 

 science, engineering, mathematics and physics on biological problems Researchers at the 

 Center were involved in the development of the first automated DNA sequencer, and their 

 current research is leading to new analytical instrumentation with greater sensitivity and 

 productivity than existing instruments Recently, the University of Washington has capitalized 

 on the Center's success by creating a new Department of Molecular Biotechnology that will 

 provide a multidisciplinary educational program of biology, genomics, protein chemistry, 

 instrumentation and engineering 



Facilities: NSF support of large multi-user facilities provides physical and institutional capabilities 

 necessary for scientists and engineers to carry out research which enables the United States to 

 uphold world leadership across a broad spectrum of scientific and engineering fields 



