With many questions still swirling around the National Strategic Computing Initiative (NSCI), IDC announced yesterday that Saul Gonzalez Martirena of the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) will provide an NSCI update at the HPC User Forum being held in two weeks.
Launched with great fanfare as a Presidential Executive Order last July, NSCI risks provoking selective ‘tone-deafness’ in the community as few added details have emerged since. The FY2017 budget request from the Obama Administration calls for NSCI investments of $285 million from the Department of Energy and another $33 million from the National Science Foundation.
Gonzalez Martirena is a program director at NSF (Division of Physics) and currently on detail to OSTP; he seems in a good position to advise on NSCI budget and program activities. So far, there has been little news from deployment agencies involved with NSCI, for example the Department of Homeland Security or the FBI.
Bob Sorensen, IDC research VP, HPC, moderated the first public NSCI panels at the fall HPC User Forum (October, Colorado) and recently wrote a commentary in HPCwire for calling for establishment of an NSCI czar (NSCI Update: More Work Needed on Budgetary Details and Industry Outreach).
Earlier this month, the U.S. Coalition for the Advancement of Supercomputing (USCAS) submitted a statement to Congress “advocating for full funding of the Department of Energy’s fiscal year 2017 budget request for supercomputing” which encompasses NSCI. Members of USCAS include: 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.
Gonzalez Martirena will present at the IDC HPC User Forum in Tucson, AZ, April 11-13.