By Larry Bernard
Many of the large problems that confront society are multidisciplinary, and high-performance computating can contribute in essential ways to their solution, Malvin H. Kalos, director of the Cornell Theory Center, told a congressional panel last week.
These problems, Kalos said, cross the boundaries of any one science and must be approached through systematic connections that supercomputing allows.
"Issues of the environment and medicine, to cite only two, involve many sciences -- chemistry, physics, engineering, fluid flow, biology and materials," Kalos testified. "Bringing the knowledge from these fields together to make quantitative predictions about the effects of some technological proposal would be utterly impossible without the use of high-performance computational modeling, the indispensable natural language of quantitative multidisciplinary research."
Kalos testified March 19 before the Subcommittee on Basic Research of the U.S. House Science Committee, which held hearings on the past and future of the four national supercomputing centers and National Science Foundation (NSF) support of those centers. The subcommittee is chaired by U.S. Rep. Steven Schiff (R-N.M.) and includes Rep. Sherwood Boehlert (R-N.Y.).
Also testifying were the directors of the three other national centers, at Champaign-Urbana, Ill., San Diego and Pittsburgh; Paul Young, NSF assistant director for computer and information science and engineering; Ed Hayes, chair of the committee that made recommendations for a new NSF program; and users of supercomputing.
The NSF is proposing a new program to replace the current one, which began in 1985. The new program, Partnerships for Advanced Computational Infrastructure, builds on and replaces the current program and offers flexibility and continued excellence to meet the nation's need for high-end computing, according to the NSF. But it also requires the four current NSF-supported centers to enter a competition in which only three will survive.
"Computational science is now also an essential tool in experimental science," Kalos told the oversight panel. "The most advanced scientific instruments, optical and radio telescopes, particle accelerators and computers themselves are studied, designed, optimized and verified with computer simulation. Data collection is usually automated, and the reduction to comprehensible data sets or conceptual models may involve enormous computations.
"Now the entire scientific and engineering community of the country has the opportunity to exploit the new tools of computational science," he said.
Kalos said new high-performance computers require a "major retooling of software and algorithms," which the Theory Center is equipped to provide. In response to the new NSF program, the Theory Center is creating a National Alliance for Advanced Computational Infrastructure.
This alliance will comprise a new network of cooperating organizations around the nation that are of "worldclass stature in scalable computing; in related technologies, such as virtual reality and computer graphics; in all areas of computer science that relate to parallel computing; in computational mathematics; in forefront applications," he said.
Kalos concluded: "It will transform our program into something quite new, something that will serve the best interests of the community devoted to computational science and the broader community of research in basic science."