Grand Challenge

Grand Challenges were USA policy terms set as goals in the late 1980s for funding high-performance computing and communications research in part in response to the Japanese 5th Generation (or Next Generation) 10-year project.

"A grand challenge is a fundamental problem in science or engineering, with broad applications, whose solution would be enabled by the application of high performance computing resources that could become available in the near future. Examples of grand challenges are:

1. Computational fluid dynamics for
   • the design of hypersonic aircraft, efficient automobile bodies, and extremely quiet submarines,
   • weather forecasting for short and long term effects,
   • efficient recovery of oil, and for many other applications;
2. Electronic structure calculations for the design of new materials such as
   • chemical catalysts,
   • immunological agents, and
   • superconductors;
3. Plasma dynamics for fusion energy technology and for safe and efficient military technology;
4. Calculations to understand the fundamental nature of matter, including quantum chromodynamics and condensed matter theory;
5. Symbolic computations including
   • speech recognition,
   • computer vision,
   • natural language understanding,
   • automated reasoning, and
   • tools for design, manufacturing, and simulation of complex systems."

"A Research and Development Strategy for High Performance Computing", Executive Office of the President, Office of Science and Technology Policy, November 20, 1987

A list of one liners reads:

Executive Office of the President, Office of Science and Technology Policy, "The Federal High Performance Computing Program," Sept. 1989, pp. 49–50: Appendix A Summary

• Prediction of weather, climate, and global change
• Challenges in materials sciences
• Semiconductor design
• Superconductivity
• Structural biology
• Design of pharmaceutical drugs
• Human genome
• Quantum chromodynamics
• Astronomy
• Challenges in Transportation
• Vehicle Signature
• Turbulence
• Vehicle dynamics
• Nuclear fusion
• Efficiency of combustion systems
• Enhanced oil and gas recovery
• Computational ocean sciences
• Speech
• Vision
• Undersea surveillance for anti-submarine warfare