Any decision regarding the national and international research support targeted to contribute to the accomplishment of the goals established by the Strategic Implementation Plan: America in the Age of Information must be based on a realistic analysis of the current situation in software development. Important considerations in such a decision should be both the continuity of the on-going research, which assures the reliability of the software industry, and the courage to launch new projects that lead to the goals, which assures the progress and competitiveness of the software industry.
We identify three major areas of on-going research activities that should be continued but better guided towards these goals. They are methodology and foundations, information dissemination, and support for revolutionary discovery.
Much helpful research has been done on formal foundations for software development. However, experience shows that most of the research directed towards the mathematical foundation of computer artifacts sooner or later degenerates into pure mathematics. Therefore, concerted national and international efforts must be supported to focus the research on mathematical foundations to develop software technology on a mathematical basis rather than develop a new mathematics suggested by software objects developed in an ad-hoc manner. We believe that a relevant guiding formalism is a essential basis for managing the complexity of high performance systems.
Important contributions have been made in high performance computing. However, we take the growing discrepency between the capacity of hardware and software for high performance computing to be a signal that evolution from sequential software technology is an inadequate approach for future (or even today's) systems. The mismatch between hardware capacity and software facilities is so serious as to even threaten the advances in hardware as evidenced by the number of companies producing parallel computing hardware that have gone bankrupt. Both our funding agencies, and our outlets for dissemination of ideas need to be more favorably disposed to exploring revolutionary new approaches to software development for high performance computing. While continuity with the advances that have been made must be maintained, radical new approaches must also be fostered.
Technically focussed conferences provide a vital means for the timely dissementation of new results. However, most often national and international meetings destined to report and share scientific results in the area of software development also have the goal of making a profit for the organization arranging the meeting. Therefore, the organizers select exciting sites (usually expensive resorts) and invite highly sought after specialists. This makes these meetings excessively expensive and not available to students and young researchers. But the discovery of new revolutionary approaches in software technology requires the essential involvement of the young generation. This suggests that using public funds to promote more broadly accessible conferences would be a valuable aid to attracting new workers to the area.