In Washington, the conventional wisdom is that an initiative started by one presidential administration will not survive into a new one. This seemed to be particularly true with the transition of the Obama administration into the Trump administration. However, an exception to this unwritten rule may be the case of an initiative to support exascale, data analytics, “post-Moore’s Law” computing and the HPC ecosystem. The jury is still out, but the signs are starting to look good.

In the summer of 2014, during the tail-end of the Obama administration, a team at the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) started to formulate what would become known as the National Strategic Computing Initiative (NSCI). Over the next year, the NSCI was defined and refined through an interagency process and interactions with computer companies and industry users of high performance computing. Although the initiative was formally started by President Obama on July 29, 2015, support by the US federal government for advanced computing is not new, nor is the concept of multi-agency national strategic computing programs. For example, precedents include the Strategic Computing Initiative of the 1980s, the High-Performance Computing Act of 1991, and the High Productivity Computing Systems program of the 2000s. Information concerning NSCI can be found at https://www.nitrd.gov/nsci/.

NSCI recognizes the value of US investments in cutting-edge, high-performance computing for national security, economic security, and scientific discovery. It directs the administration to take an “whole of government” approach to continuing and expanding those activities. The initiative puts the Department of Defense, the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation into leadership roles to coordinate those efforts. The initiative also identifies different agencies to conduct foundational R&D and be involved with deployment and implementation. The “whole of government” approach is quite important to collect and coordinate the resources (i.e. funding) to achieve the NSCI goals.

There are five strategic objectives for this initiative. The first is to accelerate the delivery of a “capable exascale computing system” (defined as the integration of hardware and software capability to deliver approximately 100 times the performance of current 10-petaflop systems across a range of applications representing government needs). The second seeks to increase the coherence between traditional modeling and simulation and large data analytics. The third objective is to establish, over the next 15 years, a viable path forward for advanced computing in the “post Moore’s Law era.” The fourth objective seeks to increase the capacity and capability of the entire HPC ecosystem, both human and technical. Finally, the fifth NSCI objective is to implement enduring public-private collaborations to ensure that the benefits of the initiative are shared between the government and the industrial and academic sectors of the economy.

An NSCI Joint Program Office (JPO) has been established with representatives from the lead agencies (DOD, DOE, and NSF). There was also a decision to have the Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD)’s National Coordination Office (NCO) to act as the communications arm for the initiative. Also, an Executive Council led by the directors of OSTP and the OMB (Office of Management and Budget) has been established and in July of 2016 published a Strategic Plan for the initiative.

The bad news is that there were not any formally designated funds for NSCI identified in the President Trump’s Fiscal Year 2018 request (although the initiative was mentioned in several places). In the federal government that could be the “kiss of death.” An initiative without funding often withers away and dies. The encouraging thing about the NSCI is that it may be okay that there is no specifically designated funding. The reason for this is that there other currently funded activities at the lead agencies that already align with the goals of the NSCI. Therefore, the only thing needed for “NSCI implementation” is for these activities to work in a coordinated way and that is already happening, to some degree, through the JPO. The synergy of the currently funded NSCI relevant activities provides additional hope that the initiative will survive the transition.

Other pieces of good news include the fact that the staff at the White House’s OSTP is growing and we understand has been briefed on the initiative. We also heard that the White House’s Deputy Chief Technology Officer, Michael Kratsios, has been briefed on NSCI. Another very good sign was that on August 17^th, Mike Mulvaney of OMB and Michael Kratsios issued the Administration’s R&D budget priorities. One of those, under the category of Military Superiority, was the call for the U.S. to maintain its leadership in future computing capabilities. Also, under the category of American Prosperity, the budget priorities expressed an interest in R&D in machine learning and quantum computing. Finally, there was direction given for the coordination of new R&D efforts to avoid duplication with existing efforts, which is what the NSCI JPO is already doing.

More specific information about the status of the NSCI will be available at the upcoming Birds of a Feather session at the SC17 conference (5:15 pm, Wed 11/15, Room 601). There, current members of the JPO (Mark Sims of DOD, William Harrod of DOE, and Irene Qualters of NSF) will be able to provide the latest and greatest about the initiative.

For the initiative to survive, the new administration will need to take ownership. Sometimes, with an administration shift, this may involve adjusting its scope. However, there has been previous initiatives that successfully made the administration leap intact (an example is the DOE Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI)). These tend to be initiatives that have a clear and compelling reason to exist and a sound organization that provides confidence that they will succeed.

Things continue to look good for funding the exascale program in the Trump administration. Also, the growth of large scale data analytics across the spectrum of government, industry, and academia probably means that there is a good chance that NSCI will survive the transition.

About the Author

Alex Larzelere is a senior fellow at the U.S. Council on Competitiveness, the president of Larzelere & Associates Consulting and HPCwire’s policy editor. He is currently a technologist, speaker and author on a number of disruptive technologies that include: advanced modeling and simulation; high performance computing; artificial intelligence; the Internet of Things; and additive manufacturing. Alex’s career has included time in federal service (working closely with DOE national labs), private industry, and as founder of a small business. Throughout that time, he led programs that implemented the use of cutting edge advanced computing technologies to enable high resolution, multi-physics simulations of complex physical systems. Alex is the author of “Delivering Insight: The History of the Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI).”