Getting Up to Speed: The Future of Supercomputing

by Susan L. Graham

Supercomputers play a significant and growing role in a variety of areas important to the nation. They are used to address challenging science and technology problems. In recent years, however, progress in supercomputing in the United States has slowed. The development of the Earth Simulator supercomputer by Japan that the United States could lose its competitive advantage and, more importantly, the national competence needed to achieve national goals. In the wake of this development, the Department of Energy asked the NRC to assess the state of U.S. supercomputing capabilities and relevant R&D. Subsequently, the Senate directed DOE in S. Rpt. 107-220 to ask the NRC to evaluate the Advanced Simulation and Computing program of the National Nuclear Security Administration at DOE in light of the development of the Earth Simulator. This report provides an assessment of the current status of supercomputing in the United States including a review of current demand and technology, infrastructure and institutions, and international activities. The report also presents a number of recommendations to enable the United States to meet current and future needs for capability supercomputers.

435 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2004

About the author

Susan L. Graham, Ph.D. (Computer Science, Stanford University; M.S., Computer Science, Stanford U.; A.B., Mathematics, Harvard University), is the Pehong Chen Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Emerita at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research has spanned programming language design and implementation, software tools, software development environments, and high-performance computing. She was the founding editor-in-chief of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems. She is a fellow of the ACM, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering.

Graham has served on numerous advisory and visiting committees and has been a consultant to a variety of companies. She was a member of the President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee from 1997 to 2003. She served as the chief computer scientist for the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure from 1997 to 2005. She was a member of the Harvard Board of Overseers from 2001 to 2007 and was president in 2006–2007. Graham was a founding member of the Computing Research Association’s Computing Community Consortium, serving first as vice-chair and then as chair.