John West spoke with Ed Seidel, director of the NSF’s Office of Cyberinfrastructure, about some of what the NSF is doing in the HPC arena and discovered that they’ve created an “Advisory Committee on Cyberinfrastructure (ACCI) divided into 6 task forces. One task force is dedicated to Data & Visualization, considering tools, algorithms and policies for the field. The 6 task forces are spending the next 18-24 months conducting workshops and gathering information for a report they will submit to the NSF, guiding the direction for the next 3 years.
“Software is really becoming the broader language of science,” says Seidel. “Even broader than mathematics, but we don’t really know how to fund it.” He notes that we have decades of experience funding hardware, and we now have a culture that knows how build and run very large scale datacenters. By contrast, software efforts to date have been very individual, and “there is less and less efficiency in that model” he says. “Software needs to be treated like a first-class citizen. So much is riding on the software side that it is really time to rethink how we build, fund, and maintain it.”
Great to see some large organizations working on bringing the Data Visualization & Analysis into the petascale, as well as the simulations.
