President Obama has issued an Executive Order establishing the National Strategic Computing Initiative (NSCI), which is an effort to create a cohesive, multi-agency strategic vision, and Federal investment strategy in high-performance computing (HPC). HPC systems, through their high levels of computing power and large amounts of storage capacity, are essential to economic competitiveness, scientific discovery, and national security. The NSCI will ensure that the United States continues leading in this field over the coming decades.

As the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology has concluded, high-performance computing “must now assume a broader meaning, encompassing not only flops, but also the ability, for example, to efficiently manipulate vast and rapidly increasing quantities of both numerical and non-numerical data.”

 

This coordinated research, development, and deployment strategy will draw on the strengths of departments and agencies to move the Federal government into a position that sharpens, develops, and streamlines a wide range of new 21^st century applications. It is designed to advance core technologies to solve difficult computational problems and foster increased use of the new capabilities in the public and private sectors.

The National Strategic Computing Initiative has five strategic themes.

1. Create systems that can apply exaflops of computing power to exabytes of data.
2. Keep the United States at the forefront of HPC capabilities.
3. Improve HPC application developer productivity.
4. Make HPC readily available.
5. Establish hardware technology for future HPC systems.

See the National Strategic Computing Initiative (NSCI) Executive Order to learn more. A White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) blog post discussing the initiative and a fact sheet are also available.