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EXECUTIVE OFFICE OF THE PRESIDENT OFFICE OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY POLICY WASHINGTON, D.C. 20506 HIGH PERFORMANCE COMPUTING AND COMMUNICATIONS TESTIMONY OF D. ALLAN BROMLEY DIRECTOR OFFICE OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY POLICY BEFORE THE SUBCOMMITTEE ON SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, AND SPACE COMMITTEE ON COMMERCE, SCIENCE, AND TRANSPORTATION U.S. SENATE MARCH 5, 1991 Mr. Chairman and members of the Committee: Thank you for giving me the opportunity, as Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, to discuss with you the critically important issue of high performance computing and communications. On February 4, 1991, the President announced his proposed budget for Fiscal year 1992. Among the major new R&D programs in the budget is a Presidential initiative on high performance computing and communications, which is described in the report Grand Challenges: High Performance Computing and Communications. The report, which was released on February 5, 1991, was produced by a Working Group on High Performance Computing and Communications under the Committee on Physical, Mathematical, and Engineering Sciences, which is one of seven umbrella interagency committees under the Federal Coordinating Council for Science, Engineering, and Technology (FCCSET). A copy of the report is attached. The overall goals of the high performance computing and communications initiative are symbolized by a set of what are called "grand challenges," problems of important scientific and social value whose solution could he advanced by applying high performance computing techniques and resources. These include global climate modeling, mapping the human genome, understanding the nature of new materials, problems applicable to national security needs, and the design of ever more sophisticated computers. Many such problems can be addressed through high performance computing and communications, including ones that are impossible to foresee today. The initiative represents a full integration of component programs in a number of Federal agencies in high performance computing and computer communications networks. It integrates and coordinates agency programs and builds on those programs where appropriate. The initiative proposes to increase funding in these programs by 30 percent, from the $489 million appropriated in FY 1991 to $638 millions in FY 1992. History of the Initiative The high performance computing and communications initiative can trace its formative years to the early 1980s, when the scientific community and federal agencies recognized the need for advanced computing in a wide range of scientific disciplines. As fields of science progressed, the quantity of data, the number of databases, and need for more sophisticated modeling and analysis all grew. The Lax Report of 1982 provided an opportunity to open discussions on the need for supercomputer centers beyond those previously at the Department of Energy's national laboratories. Subsequently, the availability of such resources to the basic research community expanded -. for example, through the establishment of the National Science Foundation's and NASA's supercomputing centers. In 1982 a FCCSET committee examined the status of supercomputing in the United States and reviewed the role of the federal government in the development of this technology. In 1985 this committee recommended government action necessary to retain technological supremacy in the development and use of supercomputers in the United States. Subsequent planning resulted in a series of workshops conducted in 1987 and in a set of reports that set forth a research and development strategy. A synthesis of the studies, reports, and planning was published by OSTP in the report entitled The Federal High Performance Computing Program. which was issued on September 8, 1989. The initiative in the FY 1992 budget represents an implementation by the participating agencies of the plan embodied in that report, appropriately updated to recognize accomplishments made to date. The report described a five-year program to be undertaken by four agencies -- the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Four additional partners have since joined the program -- the National Library of Medicine within the National Institutes of Health, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration within the Department of Commerce - and they have added considerable strength to the overall program. The planning and implementation of the HPCC program have been the result of extraordinarily effective collaboration by the participating agencies using the FCCSET forum. It was developed alter several years of discussions among the agencies and hundreds of hours of negotiating and interactions between all federal government agencies with an interest in computing. Agencies have realigned and enhanced their HPCC programs, coordinated their activities with other agencies, and shared common resources. The final product represents a complex balance of relationships and agreements forged among the agencies over a number of years. These agencies have achieved a level of mutual trust, cooperation, and synergism that is remarkable in or out of government -- and not easily achieved. In addition, the success of this effort demonstrates the advantages to be gained by using the FCCSET process to coordinate areas of science and technology that cut across the missions of several federal agencies. The FCCSET interagency process maintains the necessary flexibility and balance of a truly integrated program as the science and technology evolve, and it allows additional agencies to identity opportunities and participate in a given program. Description of the Initiative The HPCC initiative is a program for research and development in all leading-edge areas of computing. The program has four major components: (1) High Performance Computing Systems, (2) Advanced Software Technology and Algorithms, (3) a National Research and Education Network (NREN), and (4) Basic Research and Human Resources. The program seeks a proper balance among the generic goals of technology development, technology dissemination and application, and improvements in U.S. productivity and industrial competitiveness. It incorporates general purpose advanced computing as well as the challenges ahead in massively parallel computing. In the development of computing hardware, ambitious goals have been set. The program seeks a thousandfold improvement in useful computing capability (to a trillion operations per second). The focus will be on the generic technologies that will prove valuable in many different sectors. Where appropriate, projects will be performed on a cost-shared basis with industry. In software development, the program will focus on the advanced software and algorithms that in many applications have become the determining factor for exploiting high performance computing and communications. In particular, software must become much more user-friendly if we are to provide a much larger fraction of the population with access to high performance computing. The National Research and Education Network (NREN) would dramatically expand and enhance the capabilities of the existing interconnected computer networks called the Internet. The overall goal is to achieve a hundredfold increase in communications speed (to levels of gigabits per second). In addition, the number of "on- ramps" and "off-ramps" to the network would he greatly expanded, bringing the potential of high performance computing to homes, offices, classrooms, and factories. Such a network could have the kind of catalytic effect on our society, companies, and universities that the telephone system has had during the twentieth century. A new meaning will be given to communication, involving not just the transfer of knowledge but a full sharing of resources and capabilities that no single site possesses. Finally, the HPCC initiative will add significantly to the nation's science and technology infrastructure through its impacts on education and basic research. It is my personal view that the successful implementation of this program will lay the foundation for changes in education at all levels, including the precollege level. Of course, no plan is better than its execution, and the execution of the HPCC initiative will rely heavily on the synergy that has been carefully cultivated among the participating agencies. This synergy has been fostered by allowing each agency to do what it does best in the way that it does best. Each of the four founding agencies has national constituencies and historical strengths. DARPA, for example, will lead in fostering the development of breakthrough system technologies, as it has done in the past for time-sharing, network operating systems, and RISC architecture. DOE, through its historical ties with the national laboratories, has always led in the development and use of HPCC technologies and is applying them on the cutting-edge of scientific problems. NASA will continue to pursue a new wave of space-related and aeronautics problems, such as computational aerodynamics, as well as its strength in the collection, modeling, simulating, and archiving of space-based environmental data. And NSF's close ties with the academic community gives it a special expertise in both education and in the coordination and use of NREN. Expected Returns of the Initiative The high performance computing and communications initiative represents a major strategic investment for the nation with both economic and social returns. I personally believe that few technology initiatives have the potential to have a greater impact on the ways we live and work than does the high performance computing and communications initiative. The high-performance end of the computer market is relatively small, but its influence far transcends its size. The high end is where leading-edge technologies and applications are developed. Recent history indicates that these developments diffuse so quickly throughout the overall market that "superminis" and "superworkstations" are no longer contradictions in terms. A federal investment in the leading-edge computing technology will speed the growth of the overall computer market and may catalyze investments on the part of U.S. industry. At the same time, supercomputers are not the only important hardware component; we shall not forget the importance of the smaller, more widely distributed units and their role in the overall system. In addition, the HPCC initiative will he a major contributor to meeting national needs. National security, health, transportation, education, energy, and environment concerns are all areas that have grown to depend on high performance computing and communications in essential ways. The dependence will grow as computers become more powerful, cheaper, more reliable, and more usable. HPCC is also critical for the nation's scientific infrastructure. The electronic computer was born as a scientific tool, and its early development was driven by scientific needs. Business applications soon came to dominate its development, but recently there has been a renewed focus on computers as an instrument in science. Indeed, "computational science," which incorporates modeling, simulation and data rendition, is adding a third dimension to experimentation and theory as modes of scientific investigation. In field after field of fundamental and applied sciences, problems intractable for either theory or experimentation are being successfully attacked with the aid of high speed computation. Diffusion of the Initiative's Benefits If the HPCC initiative is to realize its full potential, it is not enough that it reach its technology goals. It is equally important that the technologies be deployed by the private sector in a timely way to result in an acceleration of market growth. It is likewise insufficient for applications to be developed and problems to be solved; in addition, the benefits accruing from those solutions must be disseminated so as to influence our everyday lives. The continued development and use of government-funded high performance computing and communications prototypes can have a significant positive impact on the potential commercialization of these technologies. In addition, many organizations that cannot individually justify the hardware investments will be able to gain access to these new computing systems via the new network Thus, the knowledge gained through the timely development and use of prototype systems and the access provided to them by the network will significantly improve the dissemination of the benefits of the initiative. However, this wide diffusion is not possible by federal action alone. The Administration's HPCC initiative will serve the nation best as a catalyst for private actions. Some analysts have suggested that the HPCC initiative can spur several hundred billion dollars of GNP growth. If so, it will be because American companies, both large and small, are able to deploy the technologies in producing quality goods and services. Similarly, some predict that NREN will lead to the establishment of a truly national high speed network that connects essentially every home and every office. If that happens, it will be because private investments are stimulated by government leadership. Far from suppressing or displacing the focus of a free market, the HPCC initiative will strengthen them by providing the impetus for vigorous private action. Congressional Initiatives in High Performance Computing and Communications The breadth and balance of the high performance computing and communications initiative are critical to its success. The four components of the program are carefully balanced, and maintaining this balance is the most important priority in the program. For example, powerful computers without adequate software, networking, and capable people would not result in successful applications. A program that created only high performance networks would not satisfy the need for greater computing performance to take advantage of the networks and solve important problems. Similarly, the Administration's initiative relies on substantial participation by industry and government laboratories to overcome barriers to technology transfer. Cooperative government, industry, and university activities will yield the maximum benefits derived from moving new technologies from basic discoveries to the marketplace. The legislative proposals pending before the Congress, though well intended, do not fully recognize the comprehensive interagency effort brought about through years of collaboration. For example, S. 272 only specifies the program for two of the four major agencies included in the high performance computing and communications initiative. In addition, S. 272 incorrectly specifies the roles of the agencies; many of the requirements of the legislation have, in fact, already been accomplished; and the agencies have moved on to further scientific and technical challenges. The legislation, in effect, may detract from the existing programs by limiting the activities of the agencies and by causing an unintended revision of complex relationships forged between the agencies. For these reasons, I strongly believe that FCCSET activities should not be codified in law. I am concerned that legislative action not limit the flexibility of what is by nature an extremely dynamic process. When research plans are developed to implement interagency programs, those plans are inevitably dynamic, just as the research efforts they describe are dynamic and evolving. If research plans are codified in law, it suggests that the research is static. This is particularly a concern with high performance computing and communications, where the pace of technological change is dramatic. As an example of a fast-moving research opportunity, I might mention a joint Los Alamos National Laboratory/DARPA effort that successfully applied an innovative massively parallel Connection Machine Computer system to a nuclear weapons safety code to gain new and valuable insights into the safety of the nuclear weapons inventory. Another example occurred in the last year at the National Library of Medicine's National Center for Biotechnology Information, where researchers developed a new fast algorithm for sequence similarity searches of protein and nucleic acid databases. This was very helpful in the identification of a gene causing von Rocklinghausen's neurofibromatosis. This is a major breakthrough in the understanding of this bewildering disorder that affects about 1 in 3,000 people. On the networking front, significant achievements have also been made. For example, the NSFNET has increased in speed a thousandfold (from 56 kilobits per second to 45 megabits per second) since 1988. S. 272 has as its focal point the issuing of a plan that would delineate agency roles and include specific tasks. However, the Administration's initiative and the accompanying FCCSET report satisfy these demands for items to be incorporated in the planning phase. S. 272 further calls for the establishment of an advisory panel to provide additional input into the plan. But many of the agencies already have current advisory panels, and private sector participation is fully anticipated in the Administration's initiative as agency programs move forward to implementation. Moreover, the oversight role of the Congress, including the hearings scheduled this week in the House and Senate, serve as important elements in the fine tuning of the program. The National Research and Education Network described in the initiative addresses the need for greatly enhanced computer communications highlighted in the legislation. The initiative also seeks to be comprehensive in addressing the roles of the various R&D agencies -- for example, by allowing other agencies to join the effort as appropriate. It bears emphasis that the Administration's initiative uses the existing statutory, programmatic, budgetary, and authorizing authorities of the agencies and departments involved in the initiative, including OSTP. The funding levels necessary to proceed with this effort have been transmitted to the Congress in the President's request and are clearly reflected in the budgets of each of the eight agencies involved in the initiative. The Congress already has the ability to positively affect the high performance computing program of the federal government through existing authorizations and appropriations. FCCSET is a very important mechanism within the Executive Branch for reviewing and coordinating research and development activities that cut across the missions of more than one federal agency. Unlike the committees in the Legislative Branch, each of which has discrete authority for oversight, interagency committees within FCCSET are forums for discussion, analysis, collaboration, and consensus building. The member agencies then have the responsibility for implementing the program and proceeding with the necessary contracting, budgeting, and so on developed through the interagency process. Several legislative vehicles, in addition to S. 272, have been introduced that seek to endorse and advance the Administration's initiative. I welcome the Congress's interest and intentions in high performance computing and communications. I am confident that by working together we can have a significant impact on the nation's future through these efforts, and I welcome suggestions from Congress to improve the current initiative. I might suggest that hearings to receive the views of all the various communities involved with this proposal and a positive endorsement of this program by Congress would be of great assistance in advancing high performance computing and communications in this country. Positive action on the requested appropriations will ensure that this extensive interagency program can go forward. Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, let me conclude by saying that I look forward to working cooperatively with you on this initiative. We share the same goals, and I am confident that we can reach a consensus on how best to achieve them.