INDUSTRY

The President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee is warning that inadequate and outmoded structures within the federal government mean that essential computational science research is not being properly supported, compromising US scientific leadership in all disciplines along with economic competitiveness and national security in a research report. “While it is itself a discipline, computational science serves to advance all of science.... But despite the fundamental contributions of computational science to discovery, security, and competitiveness, inadequate and outmoded structures within the federal government and the academy today do not effectively support this critical multidisciplinary field,” says a newly released report from PITAC. ResearchResearch reports that the committee maintains that despite the accelerating IT revolution, the nation has not responded to the central role that computational science and high-end computing play in scientific, social science, biomedical, and engineering research. Traditional disciplinary boundaries – both in academia and federal R&D agencies –are severely inhibiting the development of computational science, it adds. “To confront these issues, universities must significantly change their organizational structures to promote and reward collaborative research that invigorates and advances multidisciplinary science....Federal R&D agencies face similar structural issues,” the study states. PITAC concludes that the nation’s research infrastructure has not kept pace with technology. “By starving research in enabling software and applications, the imbalance forces researchers to build atop inadequate and crumbling foundations rather than on a modern, high-quality software base. The result is greatly diminished productivity for both researchers and computing systems.”