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CRA Testimony on the High Performance Computing and Communications Act

October 31, 1995

Mr. Chairman and members of the Subcommittee, thank you for the opportunity to testify on the subject of the reauthorization of the High Performance Computing and Communications Act. My name is Ed Lazowska. I head the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington. In addition, I serve on the Board of Directors of the Computing Research Association (CRA) and head its Government Affairs Committee. I am here in that capacity today, representing the nearly 200 industrial research laboratories and academic departments in computer science and computer engineering that are members of CRA and that perform most of the nation's cutting-edge research and graduate education in the critical fields of computer science and computer engineering.

I have two other affiliations that provide perspective that I will bring to bear on this testimony (although I am not here representing these organizations). First, I am a member of the six-person Technical Advisory Board for Microsoft Research. This position affords me a firsthand view of the interplay between this leading information technology company and the national research enterprise. Second, I am a co-author of the recent National Research Council report Evolving the High Performance Computing and Communications Initiative to Support the Nation's Information Infrastructure, which you have heard discussed already today by Dr. Ivan Sutherland.

I am pleased that the Subcommittee has decided to hold these hearings at this time. The Act is now about four years old and will expire in one more year. It is an appropriate time to ask what the program has achieved and where we should go from here. As a research society, CRA has closely followed the HPCC Act from its original inception and through its implementation as a program, and I am happy to have the opportunity to comment on both its past and its future.

I. Overview

Before commenting in detail on the HPCC Act, I would like to start my testimony with two general points.

• First, we endorse strongly the findings of the National Research Council report referred to above and discussed by Dr. Sutherland. In particular, we would emphasize the following points:
  1. There has been mind-boggling progress in information technology, which pervades most aspects of our lives and of our economy.

  2. The nation that leads in information technology enjoys enormous competitive advantages.

  3. America owns this leadership today, thanks to a successful and complex interplay between government, academia, and industry in support of research. The track record is crystal clear.

  4. The government's role is also crystal clear. Industry can afford to look ahead only a few years, but as a nation, we can and must invest for the long term. By and large, this fundamental basic research takes place in universities, with government support.

  5. The HPCC program is a major success. In particular:
     • The emphasis on "high-performance" is appropriate: cutting-edge information technology is a window on the future -- a "time machine." The high-performance technology of today will be the home, office, or schoolroom computer of 10 years from now.

     • The emphasis on parallel computing is a success: although there is much more to be done, its viability is clear. Many important problems throughout science and engineering have been tackled, and nearly every vendor today has some sort of multiprocessor offering.

     • The interagency coordination and cooperation is working exceedingly well. More than any other scientific field, computing research cuts across many agencies. There is no clear "lead" agency in computing, such as the role that the National Institutes of Health plays in biomedical research. HPCC represented a bold attempt to create, in a sense, a "virtual agency," a mechanism for coordinating the programs of diverse agencies, which serve diverse missions, but which all have some interest in advancing the state of computing and communication technology. From our perspective outside of government, this experiment appears to have worked exceedingly well, providing greater coherence and direction to the various programs with which we work.

• Second, CRA believes that continued authorization of the HPCC Program--continued funding in these critical research areas and continued strengthening of the interagency process--is essential to the nation for the following reasons:
  1. 1. HPCC program is the nation's research and education program in information technology. It is a coordinated multiagency initiative that supports nearly all of our nation's fundamental research and graduate education in information technology. HPCC is much more than the support of supercomputer centers, although the centers have grown into multidimensional institutions that make a wide variety of contributions to science and engineering. HPCC is much more than research on the highest-performance machines, although these systems are indeed "time machines" that offer an invaluable window into the future. Instead, HPCC is--and always has been--systems, software, networking, human resources, and research on information infrastructure technology and applications.
  2. The interagency coordination fostered by the HPCC Act has been a model success in coordinating the efforts of multiple agencies with multiple approaches. This close coordination can be seen in several specific program initiatives, including the supercomputer centers, the gigabit testbeds, the digital library initiative, and the CIC strategic plan.

  3. The HPCC program has proven to be appropriately flexible and adaptable. Fundamental research is inherently unpredictable. When Lewis and Clark were exploring America, they had a strategic goal, but their precise path of exploration was necessarily marked by false starts, backtracking, changes in direction, and searching for new paths. And so it has been with HPCC. The program has adapted and evolved in many ways, including:
     • increased focus on software.
     • increased focus on high speed digital communications.
     • the addition of the Information Infrastructure Technology and Applications element to the program structure.

  4. A strategic plan for the future exists. The cooperation and coordination stimulated by the HPCC program has been extended to a strategic planning effort on the part of the National Science and Technology Council's Committee on Information and Communications, chaired by Dr. Anita K. Jones, Defense Director of Research and Engineering, and co-chaired by Dr. Paul Young, NSF's Assistant Director for Computer and Information Science and Engineering. The plan, America in the Age of Information, identified six Strategic Focus Areas "to focus fundamental information and communications research and to accelerate development in ways that are responsive to NSTC's overarching goals, agency mission goals, and our Nation's long term economic and defense needs." These Strategic Focus Areas are global-scale information infrastructure technologies, high performance / scalable systems, high-confidence systems, virtual environments, user-centered interfaces and tools, and human resources and education.

     We think such multiagency planning and program implementation efforts are excellent, and we applaud them.

  5. Finally, the role of universities is critical. The track record is clear. Federally supported university research has played a key role in essentially every aspect of modern information technology: timesharing, computer networking (the Internet), high-power workstations, computer graphics, database technology, Very Large Scale Integrated circuit design (VLSI), Reduced Instruction Set (RISC) processor architectures, Input/Output systems based on Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks (RAID), parallel computing, and so on.

     Universities look to the future. The HPCC program has been a huge success in allowing them to push the frontiers of their research further into the future. It is also important to emphasize that university research carried out under HPCC avoids picking "winners and losers." The purpose of publicly funded research in high-technology fields is to advance basic knowledge and create new opportunities that, in the medium and long term, industry exploits.

  II. The HPCC Act

  Now, let me speak about the particular aspects of the HPCC Act and offer some thoughts about future directions. The Act was organized around four principal sections, (1) systems, (2) software, (3) NREN, and (4) Basic Research and Human resources. Since that time, the program has also been expanded to a fifth component, Information Infrastructure Technology and Applications, which emphasizes research on leading-edge applications of information systems in areas of high potential impact, areas such as education, libraries, public health, and the like as well as the technological infrastructure to support them.
  1. Systems: When the HPCC program was first being formulated in Congress and in the Administration, it was focused primarily on the largest high-end systems known as "supercomputers," but even at the time the HPCC Act was enacted, the focus of the program was broadening to a wider range of architectural goals. The emphasis was not so much on bigger, faster systems based on traditional architectures, but on exploring new, experimental architectures. In particular, researchers were exploring basic questions about the viability of the highly-parallel, scalable computer systems, and examining many different architectural concepts that seemed to have merit. Now we have a much better idea of the most promising architectural lines.

     Still, significant challenges remain, particularly how to scale parallel systems to higher numbers of processors. Performance at the chip level is improving at 50% per year, meaning that the performance potential far outweighs our knowledge of how to assemble them together into productive systems and manage the flow of work through them.

  2. Software: The focus at the time was on Grand Challenge computational science. In the intervening years, progress has been made on many computationally demanding areas of basic scientific research.

     Over the last four years, however, our vision has broadened substantially in two ways. In the first place, as we have progressed in our understanding of the design of scalable parallel architectures, there is an ever greater need to progress on our fundamental understanding of software and algorithms. Although important challenges remain on the hardware side, a proportionally greater emphasis is needed on software. If, as I suggested earlier, these advanced architectures will likely be the basis of everyday desktop systems of the next decade (and probably well beyond), research undertaken now on software and algorithms for these leading-edge systems will build the foundation for using them efficiently and effectively in the next century.

     Although computational science "Grand Challenges" remain exciting and important to explore, we are now looking at a much wider range of "National Challenges," applications that are crucial to the evolution of the nation's information infrastructure.

  3. National Research and Education Network (NREN): What a success story! Five years ago, the Internet was still pretty much an academic research network, used by researchers and students at universities. Even then, however, the base of users was broadening to undergraduate schools, to libraries, to K-12 education and to civic networks, so-called "freenets." It was at the time far from clear that NREN would ever be much more than such a specialized system.

     Now, NSF has nearly completed the process of spinning the Internet off to the private sector. It continues to grow at an explosive rate. Newspapers and magazines carry articles every day about the Internet and the World Wide Web. Commercial firms are fighting each other in the courts over network domain names. Packet-switching communications technology is an important component of the communications service and hardware industry.

     NSF, in its concern for the health of U.S. science, needs to ensure that, as the Internet becomes commercialized, the needs of researchers and students for specialized advanced data-communication services are met. A major research responsibility also remains. As fast as researchers find ways to increase the speed of networks, both the growth of traffic and the demands of new applications find ways to consume resources. Thus, there remains an ongoing research agenda in extremely high-speed, extremely large-scale data networking, an agenda that should remain in the next generation Act. Such an agenda would include the following:

     • Scaling: For all its growth, the Internet is still relatively small compared with an information infrastructure that would serve all of our society. Problems of scaling become even more complex as applications, such as the World Wide Web, are developed that gobble up increasing amounts of communications resources.

     • Quality of service: The Internet was originally designed and built as a research network. To be fully usable in a commercial and public arena, its performance must be made more predictable and reliable.

     • Security: If valuable assets or sensitive private information are to be transferred over the network, it must be made more secure, and ways to protect information in an insecure environment need to be developed.

     • Accounting: Although this may seem to be a simple administrative matter, we have only begun to explore how to measure, manage, and account for the flow of information through extrememly high-speed networks. Without new insights into how to accomplish this task with minimal overhead, such processes could more than double the cost of data transmissions, simply to allow for accounting.

     • Technical/legal issues: Many policy and legal issues are being raised as the infrastructure moves more broadly into commercial use, issues such as intellectual property protection, privacy, access to government information, the First Amendment and censorship, and the like. Many of these issues have at least in part a technological component. Some careful research could help by identifying possible technological solutions or by clarifying the technological nature of the problem.

  4. Basic Research and Human Resources: When the original bill was being considered, CRA pointed out repeatedly the need for a focus on basic research as the necessary underpinning for any HPCC program. So strongly did we feel about this that we insisted that basic research needed to be specifically identified in a fourth section of the bill, even though the other three sections arguably could be read to include fundamental investigations. Happily, Congress agreed with us.

     We think that the need for strong support of basic research is unchanged. If anything, the focus is even more on the need for such fundamental work.

     CRA has on its home page, pointers to a set of case studies describing how basic academic research resulted in significant application areas and economic benefits. I have attached four of them as an appendix to this testimony. We hope to continually add to and update this set of examples, which clearly makes the case for basic computing research.

  5. Information Infrastructure Technology and Applications: As discussed above, this new area of interest has emerged as a fifth program element. I'll elaborate briefly on just two examples of National Challenges: educational technology and digital libraries.

     Interest is growing in educational technology. I note that the Committee on Science held joint hearings with the Committee on Human Resources earlier this month to explore the potential of information technology to transform education. In those hearings, computer scientists such as Seymour Papert drew an ambitious and futuristic vision of how information technology could fundamentally transform learning. Whether Papert's vision is correct or not in the details, there is no question that information systems in the future will have the potential to play an enormous role in education. Nor do we doubt that a lot of fundamental computing research needs to be pursued before we can tap that potential.

     Just one month ago, with NSF sponsorship, CRA held a two-day workshop on a basic computing research agenda for education. We called together about 100 computer scientists and education researchers to discuss the long-term needs. A preliminary report will be completed in a month or so, and we expect the final version, which will be published both in paper form and electronically on the Web, to be available early next year. We would be glad to brief the Science Committee and/or staff on these reports and our findings.

     Similarly, in the area of digital libraries, we face a significant basic research agenda. For all the excitement that rightfully attended the evolution of the World Wide Web, information on the web has been likened to taking all the books in a large library and dumping them at random on the floor. We really don't know how to organize and search for information in such a massive distributed environment. We don't know how best to display it, how to use it, how to protect intellectual property rights for proprietary data while maintaining access to public information, and how to protect the privacy of users.

  III. Recommendations

  To summarize our recommendations on the next-generation HPCC Act:
  1. We believe that a reauthorization of the High Performance Computing and Communications Act would be an important statement by Congress of the need to continue the nation's long-standing commitment to fundamental research in the computer field. It would serve to set general priorities within the computer field and provide a foundation for interagency coordination. The Computing Research Association would support such a bill.
  2. The focus of the research program needs to be broad, but concentrated on fundamental research on the design and use of advanced leading-edge parallel, scalable computer systems, on extremely-high-speed data communications, and on the connections between the two. In particular, there is an important basic research agenda that underlies so-called "National Challenges," that will be a basic framework for the nation's infrastructure--education, library, health, government services, and so on.

  3. The authorization needs to be flexibly drawn, allowing the program to adapt quickly as new research targets of opportunity appear.

  Mr. Chairman, we understand that money is tight and that there are many claims on it. We also understand the enormous pressures the Congress finds itself in when trying to preserve research funding. But, we are also beginning to realize an enormous return on 50 years of investment in computing research (next year, we will celebrate the 50th anniversary of the invention of the stored program computer.) The information industry is still the fastest growing and now biggest sector of our economy.

  We cannot let our investments in the basic research that underpins this field falter. If we fail to invest in research in information technology today, we will lose our leadership tomorrow, and once lost, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to recapture.

  We commend your interest. Should the committee decide to draft a new bill, CRA looks forward to working with you in preparing a bill that will be an effective and worthy follow-on to the original.