APPLICATIONS

The President's IT Advisory Committee (PITAC) will examine no further issues said a committee member. PITAC was chartered by Congress under the High-Performance Computing Act of 1991 (P. L. 102-194) and the Next Generation Internet Act of 1998 (P. L. 105-305) as a Federal Advisory Committee. The Committee provides the President, Congress, and the Federal agencies involved in information technology research and development (IT R&D) with expert, independent advice on maintaining America's preeminence in advanced information technologies, including such critical elements of the national infrastructure as supercomputing. As part of this assessment, the PITAC reviews the Federal Networking and IT R&D Program. Comprising leading IT experts from industry and academia, the Committee helps guide the Administration's efforts to accelerate the development and adoption of information technologies vital for American prosperity in the 21st century. PITAC is formally renewed through Presidential Executive Orders. The latest Executive Order expired on June 1, 2005 without reappointing current members or selecting new ones. Earlier this month, PITAC released it's final report Computational Science: Ensuring America’s Competitiveness that finds that computational science is one of the most important technological fields of the 21st century, because it enables investigation of extremely complicated phenomena and processes – such as nuclear fusion, folding of proteins, the atomic organization of nanoscale materials, and the global spread of disease – that other methods cannot characterize fully if at all. The report was issued by the Computational Science Subcommittee, led by Dan Reed, vice chancellor of IT and chief information officer at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “Computational science – the use of advanced computing capabilities to understand and solve complex problems – is now critical to scientific leadership, economic competitiveness, and national security,” said John H. Marburger III, Science Advisor to President Bush and Director, Office of Science and Technology Policy. “PITAC provides a valuable service by looking at how improvements in computational science can be leveraged to advance important scientific and technical priorities.” In its report, the PITAC calls on Federal research and development (R&D) agencies and universities to make coordinated, fundamental changes to their research and education structures to promote and reward collaborative approaches essential to computational science. The PITAC recommends that the Federal government should commission a fast-track study to recommend changes and innovations in Federal R&D roles and portfolios that will more effectively support advances in computational science, remove organizational silos, and address the need for innovative, multidisciplinary approaches to R&D based on computational science. Computational science planning and coordination are characterized by a short-term orientation, limited strategic planning, and low levels of cooperation among the participants. To address these deficiencies, the PITAC recommends that the Federal government, through the National Academies and in partnership with academia and industry, create and execute a multi-decade roadmap for computational science and the diverse fields that increasingly depend upon it. The report also recommends that the Federal government establish national software sustainability centers; provide long-term support for computational science data and software repositories; support national high-end computing leadership centers; implement coordinated, long-term computational science programs to connect these centers and repositories; and rebalance R&D investments to focus on the most pressing needs of computational science – improved software, new hardware architectures, and sensor- and data-intensive applications. To request a copy of this report, please complete the form at http://www.nitrd.gov/pubs/, send an e-mail to nco@nitrd.gov, or call the National Coordination Office for Information Technology Research and Development at (703) 292-4873. Computational Science: Ensuring America’s Competitiveness can also be downloaded as a PDF file by accessing the link at http://www.nitrd.gov/pubs/.