Big Science has a Twenty-Year Plan

Earlier this week, Energy Secretary Spence Abraham laid out the Office of Science's 20-year plan for building and upgrading the U.S.'s "Big Science" facilities. Twenty-eight programs got the nod, in all. The top priorities -- fusion, and a massive supercomputer. Other goals on the wish list include studying dark energy, high-speed atomic-scale imaging with an electron laser, and fulfilling several particle-physics dreams, including a collider to rival CERN's LHC. Here's the press release and the full list (PDF). Your grandchildren may write school papers on the discoveries these tools will make...

Comments

This is very similar to...

[Qweezle]

....something like 13 or 14 years ago, when Japan was starting to make a technological comeback in the world from an industrial society, they came out with a plan that almost parallels this....on a much different scale. Japan had plans to buid many, I think in fact 20-something, "science cities", which rapidly accelerated them into the 21st century.

What's happening here is important, because the U.S. could use a serious technological R&D upgrade, in my opinion. Moving to Linux is one thing, and I suppose, particle-physics and dark energy, along with a "massive supercomputer" are another. So long as they stay within the budget...

Many different promising technologies...

[zeux]

It's nice to see that the US government cares about supporting future technology and 'science facilities'.

In France our government is doing major cut in funding of many science labs and projects and that means that we will soon be unable to keep up with America's technology.

Anyway I wonder why building a new collider where the US government could have helped funding the construction of the LHC (allowing it to be even larger) ?

I would also like to know if you think that these fundings are military related. I mean do you think the US government is putting money in because most of these technologies could have military use ?

Unfortunately it seems nothing goes to the space elevator...

Re:My Penis is Bigger Than Yours

[Rasta Prefect]

Same with supsercomputers. Supercomputers are so 80s/80s. Decentralization is the thing of today, but say, creating a grid network of 10,000 computers is not so easy to compare to some Japanese mega-thingie.

It's been said before, I'll say it again: Grid Computing and distributed clusters are a nice on a small budget, but are not a suitable replacement for a real vector supercomputer in all applications, particularly simulation applications. Note the current Top 500: The "Japanese mega-thingie" is whomping the next closest competitor by a factor of about 2.5. A cluster with about 1.5 times as many processors. And thats been around for over a year now.