Future Directions for NSF Advanced Computing Infrastructure to Support U.S. Science and Engineering in 2017-2020 (2016) / Chapter Skim
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3 Maintaining Science Leadership
3 Maintaining Science Leadership
Pages 52-63
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From page 52... ...
Advanced computing supports the education and research of thousands of students and scientists across the country, and it has been essential in some of the most significant award-winning scientific discoveries. Advanced computing has been used for scientific discoveries across many disciplines, from cosmology and astrophysics to biology and medicine.
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From page 53... ...
, including the 2013 Nobel Prize in chemistry awarded jointly to Martin Karplus, Michael Levitt, and Arieh Warshel for "the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems." The team used NSF TeraGrid resources for particle simulations to predict the structure of proteins and combine molecular dynamics with quantum mechanical calculations. 3.1 CRITICAL ROLE OF NSF NSF plays a critical role in providing the advanced computational infrastructure, including advanced computing, necessary to keep the United States at the forefront in the areas of science and engineering.
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In this study, the simulation showed earthquake waves trapped, and reverberating, within the Los Angeles Basin, leading to high-shaking ground motions much greater than expected. In 2015, SCEC used the NSF-funded Blue Waters supercomputer at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and the Department of Energy-funded Titan supercomputers at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility to carry out a simu lation that doubled the maximum simulated frequency of the previous year's model, therefore also doubling the accuracy.
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Thousands of numerical relativity simulations, each tracking the holes over many orbits before merger, are needed. These thousands of waveforms will populate carefully chosen discrete nodes that will allow accurate interpolation throughout the continuous parameter space.
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Simulating Glacial Climate in Coastal South Africa: Developing the Climate Parameters to Model a Paleoscape During Modern Human Origins There is widespread consensus that the modern human lineage evolved in Africa, and it has been hypothesized that the Cape region of South Africa may have been the refuge region for the progenitor lineage of all modern humans during harsh global glacial phases. During this phase of human origins, the economy was based on hunt ing and gathering, and hunter-gatherer adaptations are tied to the way that climate and environment shape the food and technological resource base.
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The CIF21 vision is to position NSF to "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."7 In addition, the vision calls for NSF to "build on its leadership role to promote human capital development and education in CDS&E to benefit all fields of science and engineering."8 After the publication of the strategic plan, 5 National Science Foundation Act of 1950, as amended, and related legislation, 42 U.S.C.
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The importance of XSEDE lies in its ability to work across many disciplines with a broad spectrum of users extending from novices to the most experienced users and all this at no cost of the researcher." NSF formed a foundation-wide committee with representatives from all directorates to move NSF in the direction of achieving the advanced computing infrastructure vision. 3.2 GLOBAL ISSUES Advanced computing is arguably the most critical ingredient of international science leadership, affecting leadership in other disciplines, providing an essential and often unique role in international experiments, and literally tying international collaborations together through networking, data, and computing infrastructure.
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2 Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, "Nobel Prize in Physics 2011," press release, October 4, 2011.
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Although there are fluctuations across other countries, the loss in performance share across this period is mostly explained by the growth in Asia, with China's share growing from 1 percent to nearly 14 percent today and Japan growing from 3 to 9 percent. The Association for Computing Machinery's Gordon Bell Prize may be a better metric of scientific talent and usable performance; it is awarded annually to teams who demonstrate the best performance on a real application.
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In terms of data-intensive computing, the United Kingdom's eScience program identified the emergence of data-intensive computing -- as a complement to the tradition simulation and modeling research activities -- as long ago as the early 2000s. It would later prove influential in launching NSF's cyberinfrastructure program and as an inspiration for other national programs, such as the Australian eResearch and the Dutch eScience programs.11 Another country that has made significant recent investments is Saudi Arabia.
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(UCC + TPF) FIGURE 3.1 Snapshot of Japan's roadmap for its nine high-performance computing infrastructure university centers.
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It is difficult to quantify these future impacts, except to point to the historical benefits that the United States has seen from computing and the continual demand by industry, government, and academia for experts in the design and use of advanced computing, networking, and data systems.
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