Last week, to what seems to be relatively little fanfare, the Computer Sciences and Telecommunications Board (CSTB) of the US National Academies released a report from an NSF-funded study titled "Future Directions for NSF Advanced Computing Infrastructure".

There is a press release here

News | NSF - U.S. National Science Foundation

and the report (also linked from the press release) is available as a free PDF download from the NAS at:

Future Directions for NSF Advanced Computing Infrastructure to Support U.S. Science and Engineering in 2017-2020

Advanced computing capabilities are used to tackle a rapidly growing range of challenging science and engineering problems, many of which are compute- and data-intensive as well. Demand for advanced computing has been growing for all types and capabilities of systems, from large numbers of single commodity nodes to jobs requiring thousands of cores; for systems with fast interconnects; for systems with excellent data handling and management; and for an increasingly diverse set of applications th...

At least the executive summary will be of interest to many CNI-announce readers. Advanced computing infrastructure here is viewed broadly, not just very high performance computing. Among the interesting reccomendations:

• the need for a more explicit and transparent planning process ofr advanced computing infrastucture that includes clearer long-term directions and roadmaps.

• and explicit recognition of the need to adjust to a growing use of commercial cloud services: this will have implications for the evolution and funding of campus cyberinfrastructure.

• Explicit recognition of the need for funding streams to support infrastructure (including software) and not to confuse this with research funding (also needed, of course) on advanced computing systems and services.

Clifford Lynch Director, CNI