American Super Computing Leadership Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

I rise in strong support of H.R. 2495, the American Super Computing Leadership Act.

This bipartisan bill would authorize an exascale computing program to promote the development of the next generation of the fastest computers in the world right here in the United States. The bill would also help ensure that we develop the software and algorithms that help us to make the best use of these computers.

Exascale is often used interchangeably with ``extreme scale'' to refer to the next generation of supercomputers in general. It also refers to the computing systems that would be able to carry out a million trillion operations--that is a million trillion operations per second.

That is a 1 with 18 zeros after it. Now, that is about 500 times faster than the world's fastest computers today. Developing these capabilities is vital to maintaining our leadership in a wide range of research areas.

This legislation would authorize the Secretary of Energy to support research to significantly increase the computing power available to scientists from the Department of Energy, industry, universities, and other Federal agencies.

I would also like to note that there is no new money being authorized here. We are simply ensuring that we are making the best use of our resources when it comes to the money that we are already investing.

The capabilities made possible by these investments would enable our best and our brightest scientists to gain new insights into societal concerns, ranging from Alzheimer's disease to climate change.

Other examples of both industrial and academic research that would benefit from advancing high-end computing capabilities include high-temperature superconductivity to significantly reduce energy losses in the transmission of electricity, aerodynamic modeling for aircraft and vehicle design, pharmaceutical development, and fusion plasma modeling.

Finally, this legislation would also require that the Department of Energy submit a management plan, as well as regular reports to Congress that detail how the Department of Energy expects to implement this program, as well as its progress to date.

With this bipartisan legislation, we will be establishing a transparent program that will allow the United States to remain a leader in high-end computing. I expect that we may well reap benefits from this effort, even beyond what I have spoken about today and beyond the advances that any of us can now imagine.

I would like to take a moment to compliment the sponsors of this legislation, Mr. Hultgren from Illinois and Mr. Swalwell from California, for their efforts to craft this bipartisan bill we have before us today. I also thank Ms. Lofgren from California and, of course, Science Committee Chairman Smith for his support.

I strongly urge all of my colleagues to support the passage of this important legislation.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

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Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

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