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| The Coalition for Academic Scientific Computation | |
|---|---|
| Name | Coalition for Academic Scientific Computation |
| Type | Nonprofit |
| Founded | 1989 |
| Location | United States |
| Fields | High performance computing, Scientific computing |
The Coalition for Academic Scientific Computation is a U.S.-based nonprofit consortium focused on advancing high-performance computing and computational science for academic research. Founded by university computing leaders and research institutions, the Coalition has engaged with federal agencies, national laboratories, and professional societies to shape infrastructure, policy, and training for computational research. Its activities intersect with initiatives in advanced networking, supercomputing procurement, and workforce development across higher education and research laboratories.
The organization emerged in the late 1980s amid debates involving National Science Foundation, Department of Energy, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and academic centers such as MIT, Stanford University, University of California, Berkeley, and Princeton University over access to parallel supercomputers like systems developed by Cray Research and projects influenced by Gordon Bell-era advocacy. Early leadership included figures from Cornell University, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, University of Texas at Austin, and University of Michigan, who coordinated responses to procurement and allocation policies at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Argonne National Laboratory. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s the Coalition interfaced with initiatives such as the National Research Council studies, the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee, and regional consortia linked to Internet2 and National LambdaRail.
The Coalition's mission centers on advancing academic access to computational infrastructure and influencing policy for resources used by researchers at institutions including Harvard University, Yale University, Columbia University, University of Chicago, and California Institute of Technology. Objectives have included advocating for allocations from National Science Foundation petascale programs, shaping solicitations from Department of Energy Office of Science, and supporting curriculum development at universities such as Carnegie Mellon University and Georgia Institute of Technology. The group prioritizes workforce development tied to fellowships associated with entities like American Physical Society, Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, and partnerships with centers like Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center.
Membership historically comprised computing centers and academic departments from institutions such as Pennsylvania State University, University of Wisconsin–Madison, University of California, San Diego, University of Washington, and Rice University, alongside professional societies including Association for Computing Machinery and IEEE Computer Society. Governance typically includes an executive committee, rotating chairs drawn from directors of centers like National Center for Supercomputing Applications and San Diego Supercomputer Center, and working groups aligned with stakeholders at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Brookhaven National Laboratory. Advisory relationships have linked the Coalition to panels convened by Office of Management and Budget and advisory boards that include representatives from Department of Defense research programs and private-sector firms such as IBM, Intel, NVIDIA, and Hewlett-Packard.
Programmatic efforts have spanned advocacy for campus cyberinfrastructure upgrades at institutions including University of California, Los Angeles and University of Colorado Boulder, development of best-practice guides used by Massachusetts Institute of Technology and University of Pennsylvania, and symposiums attended by stakeholders from Syracuse University, Duke University, and Brown University. Initiatives have addressed software sustainability in contexts similar to projects led by Mozilla Foundation and repositories maintained by National Center for Supercomputing Applications, as well as training events modeled after workshops from ARGONNE Leadership Computing Facility and tutorials presented at conferences like Supercomputing Conference and International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis.
The Coalition has submitted testimony and white papers to bodies such as United States Congress committees, engaged with funding agencies including National Institutes of Health for computational biomedical research, and influenced allocation mechanisms at Leadership Computing Facility centers. Its advocacy intersected with national plans outlined by Office of Science and Technology Policy and has affected budget priorities reflected in reports from Congressional Research Service and panels convened by National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Outcomes include shaping access policies for academic allocations at national facilities and informing program designs similar to XSEDE and successor cyberinfrastructure frameworks.
The Coalition partnered with national laboratories such as Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories, academic consortia like Committee on Institutional Cooperation, and industry partners including Google, Microsoft Research, and Amazon Web Services on interoperability, cloud access pilots, and benchmarking efforts. It coordinated with standard-setting organizations such as OpenMP Architecture Review Board and committees within Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers to align academic requirements with vendor roadmaps from Cray Inc. and emerging hardware vendors.
Funding sources have included membership dues from universities and computing centers, grants and cooperative agreements linked to National Science Foundation programs, and contributions from corporate partners like Intel Corporation and NVIDIA Corporation. Resource discussions have involved capital investments at centers similar to Texas Advanced Computing Center, allocation policies at National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, and shared infrastructure models used by multi-campus systems such as University of California consortia.
Category:Scientific organizations based in the United States Category:High performance computing