Ralph M. Hall, Texas, Ranking Democrat

www.house.gov/science

July 16, 2003 Press Contact: Heidi Mohlman Tringe ([email protected]) Jeff Donald ([email protected]) (202) 225-4275

WASHINGTON, D.C. - A Ford Motor Company executive today told the House Science Committee that more advanced U.S. computing capability is "essential" to ensuring the future competitiveness of the U.S. auto industry. He warned that the federal government's reliance on utilizing "off-the-shelf components," rather than investing in developing the next generation of supercomputers has put U.S. leadership "at risk."

"The Federal government cannot rely on fundamental economic forces to advance high-performance computing capability," said Vincent Scarafino, Manger of Numerically Intensive Computing at Ford Motor Company. "The Federal government should help with the advancement of high-end processor design and other fundamental components necessary to develop well-balanced, highly capable machines. U.S. leadership is currently at risk."

Scarafino made his comments at a Committee hearing to review federal policy on supercomputing.

"Supercomputers help design our cars, predict our weather, and deepen our understanding of the natural forces that govern our lives, such as climate. Indeed, computation is now widely viewed as a third way of doing science - building on the traditional areas of theory and experimentation," said Committee Chairman Sherwood Boehlert (R-NY). "So when we hear that the U.S. may be losing its lead in supercomputing, that Japan now has the fastest supercomputer, that the U.S. may be returning to a time when our top scientists didn't have access to the best machines, that our government may have too fragmented a supercomputing policy - well, those issues are a red flag that should capture the attention of all of us."

"Computation has become one of the principal tools, along with theory and experiment, for conducting science and engineering research and development. There is no question that U.S. preeminence in science and technology will not continue unless our scientists and engineers have access to the most powerful computers available," said Ranking Democrat Ralph Hall (D-TX).

Dr. Daniel Reed, Director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign stated, "The intersecting frontiers of biology and high-end computing are illuminating biological processes and medical treatments for disease...In particular understanding how proteins form three-dimensional structures is central to designing better drugs and combating deadly diseases such as HIV and SARS." However, Reed noted, "Today's most-powerful high-end computing systems can only simulate microseconds of the protein folding process; complete folding takes milliseconds or more. Such large-scale biological simulations will require vast increases in computing capability, perhaps as much as 1000 times today's capacity."

In addition to more advanced computing capacity, Reed stated, "there is a large and unmet demand for access to high-end computing in support of basic scientific and engineering research. There are neither enough high-end computing systems available nor are their capabilities adequate to address fully the research challenges and opportunities."

"The U.S. lead in supercomputers is waning, precisely when our scientific, technical and manufacturing sectors need more supercomputing capacity to achieve major new breakthroughs. We must meet this challenge to succeed in worldwide competition," said Rep. Vern Ehlers (R-MI), a research physicist.

Scarafino noted that since the late 1990's the U.S. approach to developing new capabilities has emphasized using commercially available (not specially designed components) as much as possible. "The result was an advance in the areas of computer science that dealt with parallel processing. Over the last eight years, some kinds of applications have adapted well to the more constrained environment supported by these commodity based machines...we have learned how to do 'old science' considerably cheaper," said Scarafino. "We have not made any significant advancement in new science...the hardest problems do not adapt well to parallel architectures."

Dr. Raymond Orbach, Director of the Office of Science at the U.S. Department of Energy described the agency's plans for developing supercomputers for nanotechnology and biotechnology. "In both nanotechnology and biotechnology, this revolution in science promises a revolution in industry. In order to exploit that promise, however, we will need both new instruments and more powerful computers, and the Office of Science has instituted initiatives to develop both."

Dr. Peter Freeman, Assistant Director for Computer and Information Science and Engineering at the National Science Foundation (NSF) laid out NSF's plans to implement a "cyberinfrastructure" to support research throughout the U.S.

Boehlert urged Orbach and Freeman to undertake a "coordinated, concerted" approach to maintaining U.S. dominance in supercomputing.

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