Means of Achieving Cross-program Focus, Coordination, and Technology Transfer

This paper is in response to the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) Committee on Information and Communications R&D (CIC) call for white papers on the CIC's Strategic Implementation Plan for America in the Age of Information. We agree with the identiication of strategic focus areas and the need for eecient coordination of activities. However, the Strategic Plan provides only a high level description of how the focusing and coordination will be carried out through the use of information technology. The Strategic Plan emphasizes the importance of accelerating the maturation and broad deployment of technologies, but again nowhere is it spelled out how this acceleration will be achieved. We propose the use of domain-speciic modeling of complex hardware and software systems, coupled with formation of domain-speciic but inter-operable resource and knowledge bases for achieving the needed focus, coordination, and technology transfer. We further propose the selection of a particular strategic focus area, namely high performance/scalable systems, and a particular application category, namely high performance applications, in which to initially investigate the eeectiveness of the proposed approach. If this initial focus is successful, the lessons learned and the methods and tools produced will be applicable to the other focus areas.