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Slide 16 of 28

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What’s visible at NSF today are three terms – terascale, nanoscale, and complexity. What’s not yet seen is how they interact and what they will enable.

Tera – you may have heard that NSF will be investing in a new terascale computing system for use by academic researchers. The solicitation was just posted on our web site in December.

This will take us three orders of magnitude beyond present general purpose and generally accessible computing capabilities.

We have also been examining ways to enhance our investment in nano-scale science and engineering. This will take us three orders of magnitude smaller than any human-made devices today.

Finally, we know that complexity is a defining characteristic of many systems. You may have heard about our initiative in biocomplexity.

Together, these advances will lay out the capacity for an integrated design field that is far beyond what is imaginable with today’s technology.

We’ll be able to handle both complexity and the human-machine interface in ways that are friendlier and universally-useable. That in turn will enable complete connectivity among all people.