National critical technologies report.

  • Office of Science and Technology Policy
Date:
1995
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: National critical technologies report. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    example, use computer simulation rather than physical models, for hardware development. The challenges being addressed by the High Performance Computing and Communications Initiative, such as weather prediction and the human genome project, require the most powerful computers possible. Defense use of high-performance computers for weapon design and intelligence analysis continues to give the U.S. a considerable advantage over potential adversaries. Interoperability A number of problems arise when computer systems must be made to interoperate with each other. The problem is particularly acute for large-scale integrated systems. Given the custom nature of such systems, open standards have rarely been used in the past for their data management tasks, even where such standards existed. Asa result, it is a monumental task to interconnect such systems, as the defense modeling and simulation community has discovered. The majority of data exchange standards as well as product data exchange mechanisms in widespread use today in the computer industry did not evolve through the coordinated efforts of international standard setting bodies. Instead, most of these standards started as vendor-specific specifications that eventually became widespread de facto standards due to the strong market success of particular products. In many cases, vendors, of these products seeking to capitalize on the economic advantages of owning an industry de facto standard, made their particular specifications widely available, primarily though licensing agreements. Usually, only after a de facto standard has been absorbed throughout the industry, do standard making bodies attempt to define and control such a standard. Because of the importance of interoperability to military systems, the Defense Modeling and Simulation Office (DMSO), has invested significantly during the past few years to develop appropriate standards. The continuation of such standardization efforts is a critical requirement for the foreseeable future. It is also increasingly important in commercial systems as larger and larger computer systems are used for design, manufacturing, and education. The bulk of de facto standards in widespread use throughout the commercial computer industry were defined by U.S. computer makers. For example, one of the most standardized operating systems, Unix, which includes a rich set of hardware-independent data transfer protocols, was initially developed and widely licensed by the U.S. vendor, AT&T. In another case, the standard operating system, DOS, and later Windows, provided a widespread common hardware independent software platform on which a number of applications software vendors base their products. This process enabled vendors of different systems to communicate easily using the operating system's communications facilities as a common language.