ADVANCED COMPUTATIONAL INFRASTRUCTURE AND RESEARCH $85,420,000

The FY 2003 Budget Request for the Advanced Computational Infrastructure and Research (ACIR) Subactivity is $85.42 million, a decrease of $1.55 million, or 1.8 percent, below the FY 2002 Current Plan of $86.97 million.

(Millions of Dollars)

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 the Advanced Computational Infrastructure (ACI) line item, FY 2003 will be the fifth full year for the Partnerships for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (PACI) program, which will be supported at $71.49 million. The ACI line item also provides operations support for the recently established Terascale Computing Facilities funded in the MREFC Account.

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, develop, apply, and test software, tools, and algorithms to further the growth of a set of interconnected resources. These resources consist of advanced visualization and data handling capabilities linked with high-end computing capabilities.

PACI activities include the following.

• Access - making available a diverse set of advanced and mid-range compute engines, data storage systems, and experimental machine architectures.
  
  
• Enabling Technologies - developing parallel software and computation tools to enable effective exploitation of the partnerships' widely distributed, architecturally diverse, machines and data sources.
  
  
• Application Technologies - developing and optimizing discipline-specific codes and software infrastructures, making these broadly available to researchers.
  
  
• 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 2003, reallocations will be made within the PACI program to provide operations support for the first Terascale Computing Facilities.

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 2003, funding support totals $6.93 million, a decrease of $130,000 from FY 2002. However, the impact on researchers of this decrease 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 those resources or requiring users to adapt data or software to unfamiliar computing environments. Researchers working with these grids are developing methods for security and privacy, distributed storage, grid measurement, and other techniques to enable seamless and efficient access to resources.