The high-performance computing continuum

Supercomputers, large scientific instruments, and multiterabyte scientific databases, data archives, and digital libraries are becoming ubiquitous, continuous, and pervasive. At the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI), one of the two partnerships in the National Science Foundation PACI program, opportunities presented by the computing continuum at the high end are leveraged to build the next-generation national and international computational research infrastructure. NPACI's efforts rest on several fundamental principles. One of the most important is yoking together the computer science and the applications science research communities into a persistent intellectual infrastructure. Another fundamental guiding principle is the combination of applications pull and technology push. Each partnership project includes substantial elements from both.