National Coordination Office for High Performance Computing and Communications Archives

Publications and reports, Congressional activities, meeting materials and minutes, Presidential Advisory Committee activities, conference and workshop materials, visual media used in presentations, correspondence, and transcripts document Federal HPCC Program and NCO/HPCC activities and accomplishments. The majority of materials in this archive were transferred from the NCO's original offices headquartered at NLM under the leadership of the NCO's first Director Dr. Donald A.B. Lindberg; those documenting NASA and the Coalition for Academic Supercomputing Centers were compiled and donated by James R. Fischer and Susan Fratkin, respectively.

Together the collection represents materials about the need for what became the HPCC Program; the passage of the HPC Act of 1991 and subsequent bills, hearings, reports, and laws; the Program itself; and activities and publications of (a) the NCO, (b) HPCC agencies including NLM and NASA, (c) research universities, (d) the NREN and the Internet (ARPANET, predecessor to the Internet, had been created in 1969 by ARPA, an HPCC agency), (e) the President's IT Advisory Committee authorized in the 1991 Act, and (f) supercomputer centers, research labs, professional organizations including the Coalition for Academic Supercomputing Centers (CASC), corporations, and international organizations.

The 270 items about medicine and computing that NLM Director DAB Lindberg brought from his NLM office to his NCO/HPCC office when the NCO was established in September 1992.

Patient identification, DAB Lindberg et al on the medical engineering interface, communications satellites in health education, MEDLARS services, computerized bibliographic searches of medical literature, electronic publishing, information systems for the medical sciences, image storage and retrieval, etc.

Patient management, clinical decision making, etc.

Knowledge representation, computer networks, information-sharing systems, search and retrieval, machine translation, continuing medical education, computers in medicine, medical informatics education, etc.

Telecommunications, decision analytics, data security, fuzzy logic, computerized medical records, hospital information systems, medical writing, etc.

AI/RHEUM, biomedical education, 1950s-1970s materials about NLM, medical informatics, clinical decision making, DxPlain, AI in medicine, Human Genome, health communications, querying MEDLINE over the Internet, electronic radiography, etc.

International health, DeBakey work, searching MEDLINE, data for nurses, NREN, accessing full-text medical information, etc.

Deacidified paper, DeBakey on medical libraries, supercomputers and AI, automated vocabulary mapping, natural language search, physician attitudes, broadband, data collection, Bayes' Rule, library of the future, etc.

Expert system, AI in information retrieval systems, machine intelligence vs. machine-aided intelligence in information retrieval, Kanji characters, CAT scans, MPPs, search and dissemination, etc.

Knowledge organization, Bayesian probability, expert diagnosis, effectiveness of full-text document retrieval system, ethical and legal issues, etc.

The HPC Act of 1991, which was signed into law on December 9, 1991, requires an annual report to Congress. 535 copies of the report were hand-delivered to the Senate mail room every year, for distribution to each member of Congress. They were known as Blue Books from 1992 to 2005, then as Supplements. They describe the Program's goals and priorities, programs and activities, and funding by agency and by HPCC program element. The full series, through at least FY 2017, can be found at https://www.nitrd.gov/Publications/SupplementsAll.aspx.

Topics include the need for and what became the HPCC Program, HPCC agency activities, and policy.

About 50 items. Topics include supercomputers (including science and engineering applications that require supercomputing, U.S. leadership, access by university-based researchers, procurement, NSF supercomputer centers, the supercomputer industry, government policies), computer research, scientific computing and computational science, a national research network, NSFNET, information technology, human genome, imaging. Publishers et al include FCCSET, GAO, HPCC agencies, NAP, NCSA, OTA, SIAM.