HPCwire: An Alternative Approach to NSF Funding of HPC

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January 25, 2008

An Alternative Approach to NSF Funding of HPC

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Two weeks ago, Vijay K. Agarwala, director of Research Computing and Cyberinfrastructure Information Technology Services at Penn State, sent a letter to all members of the Coalition for Academic Scientific Computation (CASC) regarding NSF funding of HPC at university-based research centers. In it, Vijay proposed an alternate strategy where a portion of the NSF funding destined for large-scale computing at a single large center be shifted to a number of smaller HPC systems in as many as 25 Tier 3 centers. The letter is intended to encourage members of CASC, an advocacy group for HPC and advanced computing technology, to consider some of letter's recommendations and help shape funding priorities for the NSF. The text of the letter is provided below.

Dear Colleagues,

I would like to share a few thoughts on why the National Science Foundation (NSF) might find it meaningful to revisit the issue of how it funds cyberinfrastruture for research computations across the computing "pyramid."

Summary of recommendations:

The science community and industry will be well served if a portion of the federal funding for large-scale computing systems is more evenly allocated rather than most of it being concentrated in a few centers. While the national centers (Tier I and II) with their ultra-large systems will continue to have an important role in meeting the capacity and capability computing needs of U.S. scientists and engineers, support for a number of university-based research computation centers will help fill existing funding gaps and address many important policy objectives and goals such as development of skilled HPC personnel, deeper university-industry partnerships, increased adoption of HPC systems as a discovery tool by larger number of academic researchers as well as by industry, improved industrial competitiveness, and economic revitalization. Support for 20 to 25 such university-based Tier 3 computing centers should be provided via a competitive solicitation and merit-based review and grant process. It is estimated that a program with $50 million in annual budget could fund, over a two-year period, 20 to 25 such university-based centers at the level of $2 million to $4 million per year.

If the number of Tier 2 centers funded is kept to a total of three, the program proposed here can take the place of the last (fourth) such proposed Tier 2 center, and in the process yield greater benefit to the U.S. science and engineering community by meeting many important needs.

It is useful to note that the major research instrumentation (MRI) program at NSF has a substantially different purpose than what is proposed here. In MRI, proposals for computing hardware compete with similar proposals for a range of research equipment. The total funding allocated to computing hardware is therefore a small proportion of the total MRI budget. Also, the MRI grants are given to a specific group of faculty co-PIs and it is principally for their use. What is proposed in this note is intended to meet the wider computational needs at the recipient institutions.

Here are some basic facts and observations that underlie the thought points of this note:

1. There is a growing shortage of HPC professionals (computational scientists). These are scientists and engineers who are well versed in some or all aspects of systems and architecture, programming, algorithms and numerical methods, some domain knowledge, the ability to think across disciplinary boundaries and integrate modeling ideas and computational techniques from different areas. The demand in academia and industry for such skilled human resources exceeds what is available today or what academia and industry together are likely to train in the near future.

There is also a nearly flat or falling U.S. undergraduate enrollment in computer science and engineering programs. This shortage impacts the rate of adoption of large-scale computations in industry as well as in academia.

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