A Research and Development Strategy for High Performance Computing
Examples of Grand Challenges
Examples of Grand Challenges
- Computational fluid dynamics for the design of hypersonic aircraft, efficient automobile bodies, and extremely quiet submarines, for weather forecasting for short and long term effects, efficient recovery of oil, and for many other applications;
- Electronic structure calculations for the design of new materials such as chemical catalysts, immunological agents, and superconductors;
- Plasma dynamics for fusion energy technology and for safe and efficient military technology;
- Calculations to understand the fundamental nature of matter, including quantum chromodynamics and condensed matter theory;
- Symbolic computations including speech recognition, computer vision, natural language understanding, automated reasoning, and tools for design, manufacturing, and simulation of complex systems.
Grand Challenges in Environmental Sciences
- Biogeochemical Cycles - understand the Earth’s major biogeochemical cycles, evaluate how they are being perturbed, and determine how they might better be stabilized
- Biological Diversity and Ecosystem Functioning - improve understanding of the factors affecting biological diversity and ecosystem structure and functioning
- Climate Variability - increase our ability to predict climate variations, from extreme events to decadal time scales; to understand how this variability may change in the future; and to assess realistically the resulting impacts
- Hydrologic Forecasting - improve understanding of and ability to predict changes in freshwater resources and the environment caused by floods, droughts, sedimentation, and contamination
- Infectious Disease and the Environment - understand ecological and evolutionary aspects of infectious diseases; develop an understanding of the interactions among pathogens, hosts/receptors, and the environment; and thus make it possible to prevent changes in the infectivity and virulence of organisms that threaten plant, animal, and human health at the population level.
- Institutions and Resource Use - understand how human use of natural resources is shaped by institutions such as markets, governments, international treaties, and formal and informal sets of rules that are established to govern resource extraction, waste disposal, and other environmentally important activities
- Land-Use Dynamics - develop a systematic understanding of changes in land uses and land covers that are critical to ecosystem functioning and services and human welfare.
- Reinventing the Use of Materials - develop a quantitative understanding of the global budgets and cycles of materials widely used by humanity and of how the life cycles of these materials may be modified.
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Grand Challenges in Global Health (BMGF GCGH) Goal 1: Improve childhood vaccines
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Grand Challenges in Engineering
- Make solar energy economical
- Provide energy from fusion
- Develop carbon sequestration methods
- Manage the nitrogen cycle
- Provide access to clean water
- Restore and improve urban infrastructure
- Advance health informatics
- Engineer better medicines
- Reverse-engineer the brain
- Prevent nuclear terror
- Secure cyberspace
- Enhance virtual reality
- Advance personalized learning
- Engineer the tools of scientific discovery
A Strategy for American Innovation
- Unleash a clean energy revolution
- Accelerate biotechnology, nanotechnology, and advanced manufacturing
- Develop breakthrough space capabilities and applications
- Drive breakthroughs in health care technology
- Create a quantum leap in educational technologies
21st Century Grand Challenges
- revolutionize our understanding of the human mind and uncover new ways to treat, prevent, and cure brain disorders
- make solar energy cost competitive with coal by the end of the decade
- find all asteroid threats to human populations and know what to do about them.
- for international development, define problems, identify constraints, and provide evidence based analysis, create and support of self-perpetuating systems, rather than one-off inventions or interventions.