The Low Down on the New National Strategic Computing Initiative

 by Tomas O’Keefe, Consultant

On July 29^th, President Obama released a new executive order entitled: “Creating a National Strategic Computing Initiative.” This executive order seeks “to maximize benefits of high-performance computing (HPC) research, development, and deployment” for the benefit of not only federal departments but also economic competitiveness and scientific discovery in the United States. The order establishes the National Strategic Computing Initiative (NSCI), an effort to create a cross-agency development strategy for HPC and a way to leverage budget among a multitude of agencies to further scientific success and promote exascale computing.

These are the top five objectives of the National Strategic Computing Initiative:

1. Accelerating delivery of a capable exascale computing system
2. Establishing a roadmap for future HPC systems
3. Developing an enduring public-private collaboration
4. Increasing coherence between modeling and simulation and data analytic computing technologies
5. Addressing HPC challenges in networking technology, workflow, downward scaling, foundational algorithms and software, accessibility, and workforce development

It’s those last two bullets that should really be of interest to technology vendors, because there are opportunities on both the hardware and the software side of the NSCI. Analytics, data management, networking, eLearning, and human capital management providers could all reap the rewards of this new executive order.

The executive order also identifies a variety of different federal departments taking the lead or having a special role to play in the NSCI. It’s these departments you should be focusing on. The three leads are the Department of Defense, Department of Energy, and the National Science Foundation, and these agencies should be your first focus in pursuit of NSCI opportunities. Next up are the foundational and development agencies: the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) within the Department of Commerce, and they’ll focus on the transition of research and development efforts into practice. Lastly, five agencies will handle the deployment of work developed by the IARPA and NIST: NASA, FBI, NIH, DHS, and NOAA.

If you fall into the technology areas identified by the President as crucial in his executive order and you support one of the above departments, you‘re in excellent position to be a technology innovator supporting the President’s National Strategic Computing Initiative.

Need help identifying top federal decision makers and opportunities in the High-performance Computing market? Contact immixGroup’s industry-leading Market Intelligence team today to learn about specific offices and contacts that have a pressing need for your solution.