[Congressional Record Volume 150, Number 55 (Tuesday, April 27, 2004)]
[House]
[Pages H2381-H2382]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




 INTRODUCTION OF THE HIGH-PERFORMANCE COMPUTING REVITALIZATION ACT OF 
                                  2004

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Boozman). Pursuant to the order of the 
House of January 20, 2004, the gentlewoman from Illinois (Mrs. Biggert) 
is recognized during morning hour debates for 5 minutes.
  Mrs. BIGGERT. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to introduce the High-
Performance Computing--or HPC--Revitalization Act of 2004, which will 
ensure that America remains a leader in the development and use of 
supercomputers. When we think of how computers affect our lives, we 
probably think of the work we do on our office desktop machines, or 
maybe the Internet surfing we do in our spare time. We do not normally 
think of the enormous contribution that supercomputers, also called 
high-performance computers, make to the world around us. These powerful 
machines are used in the development of pharmaceuticals, in modeling 
the Earth's climate, and in applications critical to ensuring our 
national and homeland security.
  High-performance computers also are central to maintaining U.S. 
leadership in many scientific fields. Computational science complements 
theory and experimentation in fields such as plasma physics and fusion, 
astrophysics, nuclear physics and genomics. But the top computer in the 
world today, the Earth Simulator, is not in the United States. It is in 
Japan. Some experts claim that Japan was able to produce the Earth 
Simulator, a computer far ahead of American machines, because the U.S. 
had taken an overly cautious or conventional approach. Beginning in the 
1990s, the U.S. focused on a single architecture for high-performance 
computing and emphasized the use of commercially available components 
over custom-made components. In hindsight we see that this approach has 
meant lost opportunities. Japan's Earth Simulator is an example of a 
road not taken.
  The U.S. is still a leader in supercomputing. In fact, 10 of the top 
20 most powerful computers in the world today are in the United States. 
Even so, the Earth Simulator is nearly three times as fast as the most 
powerful computer in the U.S., The ASCI Q computer at Los Alamos 
National Laboratory. But for security reasons, most U.S. scientists are 
unable to conduct research on the Los Alamos machine, or at machines at 
other similarly secure facilities that do defense and weapons work. 
That is why we must commit to providing sustained support for high-
performance computers at our civilian Federal agencies. To achieve this 
aim, my bill ensures that the U.S. research community has access to 
high-performance computing systems that are among the most advanced in 
the world, and provides technical support for users of these systems.
  But it is not enough to simply buy big machines. We need to have a 
balanced, comprehensive approach to maximize the benefits these 
machines can bring to science and to our Nation. My bill provides 
support for all aspects of high-performance computing for scientific 
and engineering applications.
  The original legislation that my bill amends, the High Performance 
Computing Act of 1991, gave rise to an interagency planning process 
that was initially highly successful. Unfortunately, that planning 
process has lost the vitality it had in its early years. Congress must 
find a way to reinvigorate the interagency process.
  My bill does so by requiring the Director of the Office of Science 
and Technology Policy at the White House

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to develop and maintain a research, development and deployment roadmap 
for the provision of high-performance computing systems for use by the 
research community in the United States. By putting OSTP in charge of 
developing the program's long-term vision, this provision will help 
ensure a robust planning process so that our national high-performance 
computing effort is not allowed to lag in the future.
  Let me close by reflecting for a moment on how much things have 
changed in the past 13 years since Congress first passed legislation on 
high-performance computing. Incredibly, all of the power of the world's 
top supercomputer in 1991, the Cray C90, is now available to us in a 
desktop PC. Hearing a comparison like that, it might be tempting to 
think that today's supercomputers are so powerful that we could not 
possibly need anything with greater capabilities. But technological 
advances make new things possible, things that were literally 
unimaginable before. As we meet in this Chamber today, we cannot 
imagine the kinds of problems that the supercomputers of tomorrow will 
be able to solve. But we can imagine the kinds of problems we will have 
if we fail to provide researchers in the United States with the 
computing resources they need to remain world class. I believe that the 
High-Performance Computing Revitalization Act will guide Federal 
agencies in providing needed support to high-performance computing and 
its user communities. Our Nation's scientific enterprise, and our 
economy, will be the stronger for it.

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