March 28, 1997
Media Contacts: Warren R. Froelich, UCSD, (619) 534-8564, [email protected]
Ann Redelfs, SDSC, (619) 534-5032, [email protected]
UCSD-LED PARTNERSHIP WINS COMPETITION TO REVOLUTIONIZE NATIONAL HIGH-PERFORMANCE COMPUTING CAPABILITIES
A multi-center partnership led by the University of California, San Diego has been named as one of two awardees for the National Science Foundation's new Partnerships for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (PACI) program. The announcement today by the National Science Board, the oversight advisory group of the National Science Foundation, allows UCSD to enter into negotiations for a five-year grant.
UCSD's partnership--the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI)--teams 37 of the nation's leading academic and research institutions to revolutionize high-performance computing to keep the United States ahead in all fields of science and engineering.
The other winning proposal came from the National Computational Science Alliance, a partnership led by the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Funding for the five-year awards is slated to begin October 1, 1997.
As envisioned, the partnership will tackle some of the nation's most intractable scientific and engineering problems, including the need for improved forecasts for climate and weather, the rational design of drugs to treat disease, and the creation of materials needed for a new generation of transportation and telecommunications networks and systems. Advances in these technologies will push future economic growth, while students and scientists at all levels will gain access to a vast reservoir of interactive information for education and training.
Sid Karin, founding director of SDSC, will serve as director of NPACI and will chair an Executive Committee that will be the primary decision-making body for the partnership.
"NPACI has assembled the most knowledgeable people in computational and computer science," said Karin. "Together with the Alliance, we will build a coordinated, national infrastructure that will provide unprecedented computational capabilities for the nation's researchers. This is a rare opportunity to have a profound impact on scientific progress."
An essential ingredient of the UCSD-led proposal is the creation of a national "metacomputing" environment, that will harness diverse high-end computers, electronic storage and visualization systems linked over geographically dispersed sites by high-speed networks. This vast network of resources will permit researchers to solve computation-intense problems in science and engineering, establish vast libraries of data and visual information, and allow this information to be manipulated by scientists collaborating with each other over long distances.
"This is an exciting opportunity to support collaboration among academia, industry, and government to advance high performance computing," said UCSD Chancellor Robert C. Dynes. "We are proud to have assembled such a high-caliber group for this project. Through sharing of ideas and expertise, the NPACI partnership will guide the nation in innovation and discovery based on computational methods."
NPACI partner sites will participate in the deployment of computing and data resources, technology and applications development, and education/outreach activities; many will participate in all three areas. Development work will focus on "thrust areas" to motivate, guide, and validate the evolution of the infrastructure. As areas poised for scientific discovery and technology development, NPACI initially will focus on Molecular Science, Neuroscience, Earth Systems Science, and Engineering. Three technology areas will be pursued that are central to creating the planned metacomputing environment: Adaptable, Scalable Tools/Environments, Data-intensive Computing, and Interaction Environments.
"We expect this list of thrust areas to evolve," said Karin, "with thrusts added and deleted as the work progresses, technologies develop, and new computational needs become manifest."
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