The following is a special contribution to this blog by Doug Burger, Director of Hardware, Devices, and Experiences at Microsoft Research. I served as a panelist at the White House National Strategic Computing Initiative Workshop (NSCI) on October 20-21. I took away a number of points about the consensus of the group that I thought worth sharing with the broader community. 1) It is clear that CMOS is coming to an end.  That was a striking consensus of the group, both on per-transistor costs and scaling. The semiconductor researchers are looking for extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) to come online, although they’ve been struggling with it for 10 years, still don’t have […]

The following is a Computing Research Policy Blog post by Peter Harsha, CRA Director of Government Affairs.  Experts from academia and government, including Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council Chair Greg Hager, told a congressional panel on Wednesday that the Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) program remains a crucial part of the extraordinarily productive computing research ecosystem that has made the U.S. the world leader in IT and deserves further support. The experts were witnesses at a hearing called by the House Science, Space and Technology Subcommittee on Research and Technology to review the status of the NITRD program in advance of possible reauthorization legislation from the committee. Hager, […]

The White House just wrapped up their National Strategic Computing Initiative Workshop (NSCI). The purpose of the workshop was to maximize the impact and inform long term planning for the NSCI, by creating new partnerships between academia and industry. Tom Kalil, Deputy Director for Policy for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, laid out the newly released nanotechnology-inspired Grand Challenge and asked the audience: What are the main actions that we need to develop in order to carry out the president’s five main actions laid out in the NSCI? The three themes from the workshop were: Convergence of data-intensive and numerically intensive computing Hardware technology for future HPC systems Improving productivity in […]

On October 20, as part of the rollout of the National Strategic Computing Initiative, the White House announced their nanotechnology-inspired grand challenge to develop transformational computing capabilities by combining innovations in multiple scientific disciplines. Create a new type of computer that can proactively interpret and learn from data, solve unfamiliar problems using what it has learned, and operate with the energy efficiency of the human brain. In support of this rollout, the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) has released a statement of support as well as a whitepaper on the Opportunities and Challenges for Next Generation Computing. This whitepaper articulates some opportunities and challenges for dramatic performance improvements of both personal to national […]

The White House National Strategic Computing Initiative Workshop will be held next week in McLean, Virginia at the Hilton McLean Tysons Corner. The workshop will take place from Tuesday, October 20, 2015, at 8:45 A.M. – 5:30 P.M. and Wednesday, October 21, 2015, at 9:00 A.M. – 3:30 P.M. The themes include convergence of data-intensive and numerically intensive computing, hardware technology for future HPC (beyond Moore’s law), and improving productivity in HPC application development and deployment and workforce development. The day one keynote speaker is Dr. Thomas Theis, on assignment from the IBM Corporation to serve as the Executive Director of the Nanoelectronics Research Initiative (NRI) at the Semiconductor Research Corporation. The day two keynote speaker […]

The following is a special contribution to this blog from the organizing committee of the National Science Foundation (NSF) workshop to Identify Interdisciplinary Data Science Approaches and Challenges to Enhance Understanding of Interactions of Food Systems with Energy and Water Systems — held during October 5-6, 2015 at the National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) Waterfront Centre in Washington, DC. This article summarizes some of the highlights of the workshop. In the coming decades, the world population is projected to grow significantly resulting in increased strains on the world’s limited food, energy, water and other natural resources. Furthermore, these strains may be amplified due to the effects of global climate change and increasing […]