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Future Directions for NSF Advanced Computing Infrastructure to Support U.S. Science and Engineering in 2017-2020 Interim Report (2014) / Chapter Skim
Currently Skimming:

1 The Role of Advanced Computing in Science and Engineering
Pages 7-10

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From page 7...
... The term advanced computing is used in this report to refer to the full complement of capabilities that support compute- and data-intensive research across the entire science and engineering spectrum, which are too expensive to be purchased by an individual research group or department and perhaps too expensive even for an individual research institution. The term also encompasses higher-end computing for which there are economies of scale in establishing shared facilities rather than having each institution acquire, maintain, and support its own systems.
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From page 8...
... supercomputing centers program in the 1980s, NSF's Division of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure (ACI) and its predecessor organizations have supported computational research across NSF with both super­ computers and other high-performance computers and provided services to a user base that spans work sponsored by all federal research agencies.
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From page 9...
... New algorithms for analyzing data sets that are large, complex, noisy, or unstructured allow automatic discovery of patterns within data that were previously unknown. Web search engines, online shopping recommendations, and face recognition software are some well-known applications of such algorithms, but these techniques are also increasingly valuable in science and engineering.
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From page 10...
... Advanced computational models and algorithms are being fused with observational data and with more sophisticated and expensive techniques to accommodate and quantify uncertainty. Fundamentally, scientific discovery goes beyond identifying patterns in data to discovering models that explain and predict those patterns.
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  • climate researchers
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