The National Science Foundation (NSF) has released a vision and strategic plan for Advanced Computing Infrastructure (ACI) seeking “to position and support the entire spectrum of NSF-funded communities at the cutting edge of advanced computing technologies, hardware, and software.” The report “also aims to promote a more complementary, comprehensive, and balanced portfolio of advanced computing infrastructure and programs for research and education to support multidisciplinary computational and data-enabled science and engineering that in turn support the entire scientific, engineering, and education community.” ACI is a key component of the Foundation’s Cyberinfrastructure for 21st Century Science and Engineering (CIF21) framework.

Here’s the vision articulated in the report:

NSF will be a leader in creating and deploying a comprehensive portfolio of advanced computing infrastructure, programs, and other resources to facilitate cutting-edge foundational research in computational and data-enabled science and engineering (CDS&E) and their application to all disciplines. NSF will also build on its leadership role to promote human capital development and education in CDS&E to beneit all ields of science and engineering.

And the five strategies for achieving this vision (following the link):

1. Foundational research to fully exploit parallelism and concurrency through innovations in computational models and languages, mathematics and statistics, algorithms, compilers, operating and run-time systems, middleware, software tools, application frameworks, virtual machines, and advanced hardware.

 

2. Applications research and development in use of highend computing resources in partnerships with scientific domains, including new computational, mathematical and statistical modeling, simulation, visualization and analytic tools, aggressive domain-centric applications development, and deployment of scalable data management systems.

 

3. Building, testing, and deploying both sustainable and innovative resources into a collaborative ecosystem that encompasses integration/coordination with campus and regional systems, networks, cloud services, and/or data centers in partnerships with scientific domains.

 

4. Development of comprehensive education and workforce programs, from deep expertise in computational, mathematical and statistical simulation, modeling, and CDS&E to developing a technical workforce and enabling career paths in science, academia, government, and industry.

 

5. Development and evaluation of transformational and grand challenge community programs that support contemporary complex problem solving by engaging a comprehensive and integrated approach to science, utilizing high-end computing, data, networking, facilities, software, and multidisciplinary expertise across communities, other government agencies, and international partnerships.

For much more detail, check out the full report here.

(Contributed by Erwin Gianchandani, CCC Director)