Abstract :
Early in 1994 Congress asked the National Research Council to assess the goals, management, and progress of the High-performance Computing and Communications Initiative (HPCCI) and to determine how it needs to evolve to meet the challenges of the nation´s information infrastructure. The NRC´s Computer Science and Telecommunications Board convened a committee of 12 experts, which offered its assessment of the HPCCI in a recent NRC monograph. The results of this assessment are summarised: Evolving the HPCCI to support the nation´s information infrastructure. Using Grand Challenge problems as a vehicle, the HPCCI has been generally successful in developing a better computing and computational infrastructure and increasing researcher-developer-user synergy. Having helped bring parallel computing into the mainstream, the HPCCI should continue to focus its considerable expertise on new computing and communications technologies, particularly those that support the improvement of the nation´s information infrastructure
Keywords :
government policies; information networks; parallel processing; research and development management; Grand Challenge problems; HPCCI; High-performance Computing and Communications Initiative; NRC/CSTB 1995 Report; National Research Council; communications technologies; computational infrastructure; information infrastructure; parallel computing; researcher-developer-user synergy; Computer industry; Computer science; Councils; Investments; Reduced instruction set computing; Research and development; Sun; Telecommunication computing; Very large scale integration; Workstations;