Since the PITAC report titled Computational Science: Ensuring America’s Competitiveness was released in June, much discussion has taken place regarding the conclusions and recommendations contained in it. On July 1st, HPCwire published a commentary on the report by Dr. Robert Panoff, the founder and Executive Director of The Shodor Education Foundation, Inc.. Included in Dr. Panoff’s analysis was the suggestion that the report authors

… missed the chance to make their case for a broader impact of computational science: the most compelling science challenges that face us -challenges that do, in fact, justify a national effort at the large end of the spectrum- were relegated to the appendices in the report. Their main recommendation is to sustain software centers, not science. As Stan Lee would say, “‘Nuf said,”

Well, it looks as if some of the contributors to the report took exception to Dr. Panoff’s opinion. On July 15th, Dan Reed, Jack Dongarra, Chris Johnson, and Ken Kennedy issued a response to Dr. Panoff in HPCwire. In their response, Reed et al. clarify their point by stating that the main recommendation of the report calls for a

… balanced, integrated, long-term program that addresses all aspects of computational science.

Regardless of the primary recommendation, the bottom line is that any enhanced role of computational science in the United States will depend on greater emphasis by the federal government as well as clearer vision and understanding by all of the players, academia included, of how computational science fits into the overall research agenda.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 18th, 2005 at 10:22 pm and is filed under Policy, Publications. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.