Challenge sparks U.S. leadership computer plan
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Challenge accepted
Less than two weeks later, committee members met with representatives from DOE laboratories, government agencies, universities, and Office of Science program offices.
A report on that meeting noted: “The Earth Simulator allows science that is currently beyond the reach of American scientists. … The challenge that it poses goes well beyond climate and related science: The challenge is to American leadership in computational science.”
It added: “In short, without a robust response to the Earth Simulator challenge, the United States is open to losing its leadership” in a range of pioneering science arenas. With a second-class computational science enterprise, the country also stood to lose the brightest science and technology students.
Scientific computing in the 1990s had grown significantly in DOE’s defense-related programs, such as classified weapons research, but the ASCR budget “has lagged behind in both absolute and relative terms,” the report said. ASCR “has thus been put in the position of attempting to implement its plans to serve a need central to all aspects of the Office of Science missions with severely inadequate funds.”
The report concluded: “The Office of Science should embark on an aggressive, integrated program to regain and to sustain leadership in the areas of computational science important to the DOE mission.”
The science driver
Besides building fast machines, however, the full ASCAC recommended that DOE also focus on scientific computing research to optimize their use.
In a May 29, 2002 memo to Orbach, the group recommended a computational science program to foster collaboration between researchers who use the machines and the computer scientists and mathematicians who make them work.
“Since science is the ultimate driver, the initiative should have a set of urgent, challenging, and exciting scientific goals that build from the strengths of the base programs,” the memo said.
Orbach embraced the recommendations. In speeches and congressional testimony, he touted computer simulation as the new “third pillar” of scientific discovery, joining experimentation and theory.
In 2003, he told the House of Representatives Committee on Science “Advanced scientific computing is indispensable to DOE’s missions.” Every DOE office, Orbach said, had research that only scientific computing could address.
“This will require significant enhancements to the Office of Science’s scientific computing programs,” he testified. “These include both more capable computing platforms and the development of the sophisticated mathematical and software tools required for large-scale simulations.”
The five-year Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing (SciDAC) program would handle the mathematical and software research to create efficient simulation programs. The $60 million-per-year effort was deemed successful, and with Orbach’s backing SciDAC awarded a second set of 30, five-year grants, starting in 2006.
