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The FY 2002 Budget Request for the Advanced Computational
Infrastructure and Research (ACIR) Subactivity is $80.22 million,
a decrease of $1.38 million, or 1.7 percent, from the FY 2001 Current
Plan of $81.60 million.
(Millions of Dollars)
|
FY 2000 Actual |
FY 2001
Current Plan |
FY 2002 Request |
Change |
Amount |
Percent |
Advanced Computational Infrastructure |
70.74
|
73.71
|
73.71
|
0.00
|
0.0%
|
Advanced Computational Research |
7.27
|
7.89
|
6.51
|
-1.38
|
-17.5%
|
Total, ACIR |
$78.01
|
$81.60
|
$80.22
|
-$1.38
|
-1.7%
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The ACIR Subactivity provides access to, and support
for, high-end computing for the national scientific community, and
research on the development, use and applications of these computing
systems. Within Advanced Computational Infrastructure (ACI), FY
2002 will be the fourth full year for the Partnerships for Advanced
Computational Infrastructure (PACI) Program, which replaced the
NSF Supercomputer Centers Program in FY 1998.
PACI consists of two partnerships, each consisting
of a leading edge site and a number of partners. More than 60 geographically
distributed partner institutions from 27 states and the District
of Columbia are associated with PACI. The leading edge sites maintain
a variety of high-end computer systems and together with their partners,
they develop, apply and test necessary software, tools, and algorithms
to further the growth of a set of interconnected resources consisting
of advanced visualization and data handling capabilities linked
with high-end computing capabilities. The Terascale Computing Systems,
described in the MRE section, will be linked to the PACI centers.
PACI activities include:
Enabling Technologies - developing parallel
software and computation tools to enable effective exploitation
of the partnerships' widely distributed, architecturally diverse,
machines and data sources.
Education, Outreach and Training - ensuring
awareness and understanding of how to use high-end computing and
communications resources, and broadening participation in advanced
computational science and engineering.
In FY 2002, funding for the ACI line item will be
held at $73.71 million. Of this amount, $3.0 million will provide
operations support for the two Terascale Computing Facilities. These
funds will support operational costs of integrating the Terascale
facilities with the existing PACI facilities. The Terascale Computing
Systems are described under the Major Research Equipment account.
Advanced Computational Research (ACR) complements
PACI activities through single-investigator or small-group research
grants to advance the state of the art in high-performance computation.
It has three principal technical thrusts: visualization, data handling,
and parallel numerical algorithms. In FY 2002, ACR will decrease
by $1.38 million. The impact on researchers will be partly offset
by related projects funded in the ITR program.
ACIR-funded advances include Globus and Legion,
two middleware components that play an increasing role in building
computational, information, and access grids. Grids are connected
resources that enable researchers to access the best resources over
networks without complex human brokering for resources or requiring
users to adapt data or software to unfamiliar computing environments.
Such grids are developing methods for security and privacy, distributed
storage, grid measurement and other techniques to enable seamless
and efficient access to resources.
Researchers at the PACI partnerships are creating
innovative ways to harness computing power to solve heretofore-unsolvable
problems. Scientists at NCSA (located at the University of Illinois)
with partners at the University of Iowa and Argonne National Laboratory
demonstrated the power of combining computers at multiple locations.
By linking over 1000 computers from around the world, computers
from five different vendors operating together as a single parallel
computer, they solved a quadratic assignment that has been unsolved
for over thirty years. The specific problem in quadratic assignment
is to find a lowest cost assignment of facilities to locations that
will minimize the cost of moving material flows among locations.
Quadratic assignment problems arise in such varied applications
as locating factories, hospital layouts and designing computer chips.
Michael Klein and March Saitta of the University
of Pennsylvania with colleagues at DuPont Research have used PACI
facilities to model the behavior of knotted and unknotted polyethylene
strands under strain. Their results have shown a fundamental difference
in breaking behavior - knotted strands break at the entrance to
the knot while unknotted strands break at the ends where the strain
is exerted. Their work illustrates the power of high-performance
computing to deepen our understanding of molecular scale phenomena.
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