PROCESSORS

By Steve Fisher, Editor In Chief -- In the wake of the tragedies of September 11, the members of the President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC) held their scheduled meeting last Tuesday (25 Sept) in Arlington, VA. The purpose of the meeting was to examine specific aspects of the current Federal Networking and Information Technology Research and Development Program, to revisit the recommendations made in its 1999 report entitled “Information Technology Research: Investing in Our Future,” and to discuss advances in IT that may have a profound impact on the nation. The committee, established on February 11, 1997 to provide the President, the Office of Science and Technology Policy, and the Federal agencies involved in IT R&D with guidance and advice on all areas of high performance computing, communications, and information technologies, is made up of leaders in both government and academic technology research as well high technology industry executives. The Committee heard reports from its four Technology Discovery Subcommittees in the areas of scalable information infrastructure, software, high-end computing, and social, economic and workforce issues. These subcommittees have been working closely with Federal agencies to evaluate the government's investment in IT Research & Development. PITAC's National Security and Individual Security panels also reported on their recent activities and preliminary findings and recommendations. These two panels are part of PITAC's continuing work to explore the information technology research needs emerging in specific sectors and to address specific challenges created by a digital economy. What sort of discussions took place on the recent terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and alleged terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden’s use of technology was not disclosed. It seems they did take place though. Vint Cerf, PITAC member and Senior VP of Internet Architecture and Engineering at WorldCom said, “From my perspective, the PITAC meetings went very well and there was a great deal of work done to review various aspects of national and individual security. The Sept 11 terrorist attacks have led PITAC to refocus its discussions on the security aspects of national information infrastructure and I think that will be helpful in the near term budget planning process.” The committee heard from Mark Forman, Director, IT and E-government from the Executive Office of the President’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB), about the administration's plans for e-government, as well as Dr. Rita Colwell, Director, National Science Foundation (NSF), who joined the committee for a discussion on current science and technology issues, and NSF's future plans and priorities for IT R&D. In addition, the agenda included: a report from the White House by Paul Domich, Senior Policy Analyst, Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP); and a discussion led by IBM VP of Technology and Strategy, Irving Wladawsky-Berger entitled “Brainstorming the Future: Issues and Opportunities in IT.” The committee meeting also reviewed and discussed current technology events such as the recently announced NSF funding for the development of a Distributed Terascale Facility (DTF), a comprehensive information technology infrastructure to be deployed for scientific research and to be managed by a group of four research institutions -- the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California at San Diego, Argonne National Laboratory (Argonne), and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). With more than 13.6 teraflops (trillions of calculations per second) of computing power as well as facilities capable of managing and storing more than 450 terabytes (trillions of bytes) of data, the goal of DTF is to assist researchers in making breakthrough discoveries in fields including biology, genomics, astronomy, and others. Steve Wallach, PITAC member and VP/CTO of Chiaro Networks presented the High-End Computing (HEC) subcommittee report which in addition to reporting on the aforementioned DTF, also examined current events such as: Heterogeneous, physically distributed systems; Globus; Life Sciences and a new application (Genome Sequencing); Supporting PetaByte Databases; Movement to RISC based MPP’s; and the consolidation of RISC vendors. Looking to the future the subcommittee outlined its thoughts and plans for areas such as: sustained petaflop computing; making bandwidth across the country as fast if not faster than bandwidth within a center; making “secure” computing mandatory and also seeing 10 GHz processors by the end of the decade. Wallach said, "Despite the events of September 11, the scheduled PITAC meeting was held and nearly everyone was present. A number of interesting presentations were given and a lot of very productive discussions took place." Another group making a presentation was the Software subcommittee. The presentation was given by Susan Graham, Distinguished Professor at UC Berkeley’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. In her address Graham said that the software subcommittee was very pleased with the response to their 1999 report. Specific reasons cited were a significant NSF (funding) increase and excellent interagency collaboration and planning. The Scalable Information Infrastructure report was delivered by chairperson Les Vadasz, Executive Vice President, Intel Corporation. When mentioning the response to earlier PITAC recommendations Vadasz stated that there was evidence of interagency coordination, and funding mechanisms had been broadened from small, single PI projects to medium and large multi PI projects funded for multiple years. His presentation also stated that a large number of projects had been implemented that address each of PITAC’s recommendations. Most committee members were not available for comment so there unfortunately remains a degree of secrecy surrounding the meeting. The general feeling exuded by those committee members who were available for comment however was a positive one, and it seems that the government is indeed following the recommendations of this consortium of some of the best and brightest minds high technology has to offer.