Group items tagged

Strategic Plan MISSION STATEMENT The High Performance Computing Center (HPCC) promotes research and teaching by integrating leading-edge high-performance computing and visualization for the faculty, staff, and students of Texas Tech University/Texas Tech Health Sciences Center, as well as advance disciplinary diversity, partnerships, and excellence. VISION STATEMENT The HPCC will facilitate research and aid in educational advancement by integrating leading edge, high-performance computing and visualization to individual administrative units, as well as multidisciplinary units across campus. The Center will embrace this disciplinary diversity by creating partnerships, supporting and servicing all high-performance computers on campus. It will ensure that Texas Tech retains superior computing and visualization facilities.

"NOAA is recognized as a world leader in understanding and predicting the Earth's environment, through advanced modeling capabilities, climate research and real time weather products. The threat and growing concern of global climate change and its impact on national security, hurricanes, and other natural disasters has spurred growing public demand for climate and weather information with increased accuracy, shorter lead times and local detail of model simulations. "Members of the 110th Congress are introducing legislation related to global climate change at a faster pace than any previous Congress," according to the Pew Center on Global Climate Change. To meet this demand, NOAA scientists require leadership-class, high performance computing (HPC) systems with petaflops-scale capabilities (a petaflop is one million-billion operations per second). NOAA estimates that this performance requirement is similar to that of the top 10 supercomputing environments in the world. However, NOAA's high performance computing capabilities have fallen to more than an order of magnitude behind other U.S. agencies with leadership-class systems, such as the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation, who also work on aspects of climate and weather research"

Call me cynical, but I have to wonder how much feedback they really want if they're sending out more than 50 pages on the Friday of the weekend before Christmas, and insisting on replies by Monday… The plan itself is an even bigger disappointment. It is supposed to lay out the next decade's goals for the entire Canadian HPC community, but of the six goals listed in the executive summary, only one talks about people (or in government terms, "highly qualified personnel"), and the "Implementation Strategy" given is as vague as it could possibly be: "Work with universities to develop HPC support expertise and train researchers to use HPC effectively and efficiently." Sections 4.1.4 and 9.1.4 are equally vague-the latter acknowledges that "The key 'product' academia provides to businesses is Highly Qualified Personnel", but the only concrete plan I see is decoupling funding for people from funding for hardware. Again, call me cynical, but I expect that will result in less money for the former, not more…