Given divided government and the election year, the U.S. FY17 budget discussions are likely to be more contentious than usual. Seagate tweeted yesterday that it and fellow industry members of the U.S. Coalition for the Advancement of Supercomputing (USCAS) had submitted a statement to Congress “advocating for full funding of the Department of Energy’s fiscal year 2017 budget request for supercomputing.”
The statement was submitted Wednesday to Chairman Mike Simpson (R-Idaho), Ranking Member Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio), and other members of the Energy and Water Development Appropriations Subcommittee. “Our nation is once again at a critical turning point in computing technology, with industry innovations in hardware and software architectures driving advances in computing performance for mobile phones, laptops and servers, but where these advances are slowing down for supercomputing.”
Industry Members of the U.S. Coalition for the Advancement of Supercomputing (USCAS) include the following organizations: Advanced Micro Devices, Battelle Memorial Institute, Cray Inc., Hewlett Packard Enterprise, IBM, Intel, Micron Technology, Inc., Nvidia, Reservoir Labs, SAIC, Seagate, and the Semiconductor Industry Association.
Budget fights will no doubt be nasty this year, but there is hope for bi-partisan support on a number of “national competitiveness” fronts including the National Strategic Computing Initiative (NSCI). The USCAS offered several key support points for HPC:
- Supercomputing is the bedrock of our national effort to maintain America’s competitive edge in the transformative research and development that fuels U.S. innovation and propels economic growth.
- U.S. leadership in advanced computing is increasingly challenged from abroad. China, Japan, Russia and the European Union are making substantial investments.
- The countries that are first in scientific discoveries reap large economic benefits ranging from better manufacturing, rapid prototyping, faster product commercialization as well as spin- offs in computer systems, software and information technology.
- Since the beginning of the digital era, the U.S. Government has made pivotal investments in the high performance computing industry at critical times when market progress was stagnating.
The statement submitted this year is somewhat similar to a 2014 submitted statement by USCAS. Links to both statements are below.
2016 USCAS statement: http://blog.seagate.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/FY-17-Exascale-USCAS-Statement-to-HAC.pdf
2014 UCSAS statement: https://www.ieeeusa.org/policy/policy/2014/061214.pdf