Reed's Ruminations: A Blog by Dan Reed

HPC and Climate Change: Senate Hearing

On Thursday, May 8, I testified to the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Technology. The full committee hearing was on improving the "Capacity of U.S. Climate Modeling for Decision Makers and End-Users." The other members of the hearing panel were

• Alexander (Sandy) MacDonald, Director, Earth System Research Laboratory, Deputy Assistant Administrator for Laboratories and Cooperative Institutes, Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
• James (Jim) Hack, Director, National Center for Computational Sciences, Oak Ridge National Laboratory 
• Edward Sarachik, Co-Director, Center for Science in the Earth System, Professor Emeritus of Atmospheric Sciences, Joint Institute for the Study of the Atmosphere and Ocean, University of Washington
• Bruce Carlisle, Assistant Director, Massachusetts Office of Coastal Zone Management
• John Walsh, President's Professor of Climate Change, Chief Scientist, International Arctic Research Center, University of Alaska

Jim Hack and I represented the computing and computational science issues, and the other four focused on the climate aspects. Within a few weeks, our written testimony will be posted on the Committee's hearing page, and in due time (many months), our oral testimony will appear in the Congressional Record.

Computing is Beauty; Computing is Truth

In a recent invited essay for the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), which appeared in the March 2008 issue of SIAM News, I wrote about the power of computing as an intellectual amplifier and the beauty of computing as an illuminator of truth. Elements of the essay were adapted from my July 2003 and May 2004 testimony to the U.S. House Committee on Science and Technology on the status of high-performance computing.

eScience: 21st Century Science

Computing shares many features with other scientific instruments, which allow us to probe further into the unknown. Whether it is deep field images from the Hubble telescope and insights into the origins of the universe, the high energy detectors of Fermilab and CERN and refinements to the Standard Model of subatomic particles, or large-scale genetic sequencers, insights into the limitations of the Central Dogma and an understanding of the deep biological basis of life and disease, theory and experiment march together, enabled and supported by one another.

Singapore Biopolis

Two weeks ago, I was in Singapore to give a keynote presentation at GridAsia, which brought together teams from a variety of Asian Grid initiatives. I spoke about the confluence of scientific influences and disciplines via Grids and high-performance computing and the importance of culture in scientific partnerships. I believe most projects fail not for technical reasons but due to failure to understand what the reward metrics are for each collaborating group member. However, that is not the topic of this essay.

Bridge Building: Medical Research and Computing

Let's start with a bit of history. Former NIH Director Harold Varmus charged a committee, co-chaired by Larry Smarr (then at NCSA, now at CalIT2) and David Botstein (Princeton), to explore the cultural barriers preventing greater collaboration between biomedical and computing researchers. Their 1999 report led to the Biomedical Information Science and Technology Initiative (BISTI). All of this was later the impetus for the NIH Roadmap Initiative and its emphasis on multidisciplinary science.