But now the emphasis seems to be on the broader national challenges that extend the field to the more general problems of society. The national challenges are programs that correspond to the grand challenges of science and engineering. But the grand challenges for science and engineering tend to be more traditional science and engineering with very high computational requirements. The national challenge problems are those broad programs like the digital libraries program or telemedicine, which are probably going to rely on communications more than computation and which at the same time are going to directly involve many more people. I want to be careful how I say that because a lot of the programs in high-performance computing may have very broad impact even though few people are working in them.
Policies do shift.
As communications get better, it is possible to shift to programs that have broader impact, as the NII sorts of programs have. We used to speak of theory and experimentation as fundamental ways of doing science and engineering. Now there's a third mode, computation. And that has pervaded a lot of scientific areas. And, of course, I read a lot.