Durable Engines of Discovery

The federal government played a critical role in creating computational science. From the early Cold War-era funding of nuclear weapons simulation, federal agencies such as the Department of Energy (DOE), the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) have provided the long-term, high-risk investment necessary to build computing infrastructure and advance algorithmic research. The vision for computational modeling as a peer to theory and experiment began to emerge in the latter half of the 20th century. As recounted in my ACM Turing Award lecture,9 strategic investments in scientific computing established a vast ecosystem of mathematical software, numerical libraries, and performance benchmarks. This effort, driven by DOE and NSF investments, paved the way for a new model of discovery in which complex physical phenomena could be simulated with increasing realism.