Realistic crisis scenarios provide a context for understanding and analyzing the needs of crisis managers for computing and communications capabilities. The characteristics of crises discussed in the preceding section, "Definition and Characteristics," can be used in developing typical cases to motivate and test elements of a research agenda for computing and communications. Numerous crisis scenarios exist, developed by various civilian and military organizations for training and planning purposes. Access to some scenarios is necessarily restricted, in order to avoid spreading knowledge of vulnerabilities and response plans to potential adversaries. One publicly available scenario, which was used in Workshop III to stimulate and focus discussions, is summarized in Box 1.2. The scenario illustrates some of the range of demands that crises may raise.

The steering committee also developed the fictional scenario presented in Box 1.3, describing a future crisis and some of the means by which relief officials might respond, given computing and communications capabilities beyond those currently available or tested in experimental contexts such as the Joint Warrior Interoperability Demonstrations (JWIDs) discussed in Box 1.2. These capabilities are extrapolated from current areas of research. The scenario draws on workshop discussions with both experienced crisis management officials and researchers in computing and communications. The scenario is somewhat fanciful and is not intended as a prediction of future capabilities or a recommendation for particular technical solutions. Its purpose is to illustrate specific ways in which breakthroughs and incremental advances in high-performance computing and communications could be motivated by the broad range of crisis management needs that workshop participants identified.

When a crisis occurs, the first order of business is to find out what happened—to perform a situation assessment. Nicole Dash observed that a situation assessment poses two requirements related to communications. First, authorities (such as emergency services managers) at the location of the crisis must be able to communicate their community's situation to the world outside the crisis area; second, rapid response teams must be able to enter the area, perform an assessment, and communicate back what they find in real time. In many crises, the normal infrastructure of telephone and data networks will not be able to support these initial communications requirements, for one or more of the following reasons: the crisis is in a location with little communications infrastructure in normal times (such as a remote location or a developing country with weak infrastructure), the crisis itself has destroyed the infrastructure (as large natural

Front Matter (R1-R14)

Overview and Summary (1-7)

Application Needs for Computing and Communications (8-54)

Technology: Research Problems Motivated by Application Needs (55-98)

Summary and Findings: Research for National-Scale Application (99-138)

Bibliography (139-142)

Appendixes (143-144)

A Workshop Series on High Performance Computing and Communications (145-155)

B Background--HPCCI and NII (156-157)

C Acronyms and Abbreviations (158-160)