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The President Advances High Performance Computing

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By Bill Bartolone, Government Affairs for Intel  

Last week, our country moved one step closer to new and vital discoveries in science, medicine, engineering, technology and industry with President Obama’s Executive Order (EO) establishing the National Strategic Computing Initiative (NSCI). This initiative focused on advancing high performance computing (HPC), or supercomputing, will solve some of the world’s most vexing computational problems and foster increased use of the new capabilities in the public and private sectors. This coordinated research and development program will draw on the capabilities of USG agencies and departments to move into a position that strengthens, develops and streamlines a wide range of new 21st century applications.

In conjunction with the NSCI announcement, Dr. Rajeeb “Raj” Hazra, vice president of Intel’s Data Center Group and GM of Enterprise & HPC Platform Group, joined a White House “Roundtable on High Performance Computing” co-hosted by Secretary of Energy, Dr. Ernest Moniz, and the President’s Science Advisor and Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, Dr. John Holdren.

Raj shared Intel’s positions on key technology challenges and the overall goals of the NSCI going forward. During the panel discussion, he reinforced points in the EO, especially as it pertains to sustained R&D partnerships between USG industry, collaboration among agencies for effective co-design, a clear view to democratizing innovations and building up the workforce to be able to take advantage of this program. Raj also added that it is imperative for a complex initiative, like the NSCI, to agree on success metrics and to be able to manage progress against them to realize both political and technical benefits.

Intel is well positioned to support the vision and implementation of NSCI’s objectives through our expertise in the convergence of HPC and Big Data efficiencies. Also, the inclusion of areas like cloud computing supports the broad democratization focus of the NSCI and helps advance the HPC opportunities for Intel to participate in the program.

There is also an important role for Congress. We believe that the USG must modernize its legislation and regulatory practices so that HPC collaborations between government and industry yield commercial technologies and systems. Intel will continue to advocate for legislation that authorizes and adequately funds the HPC programs under the NSCI. Not doing so would greatly weakens US competitiveness in computing and communications.

We look forward to working with our USG partners to build upon the goals in the President’s EO in a way that will enable the NSCI goals.