March 2025 | Product 3004579
A National Strategic Computing
Reserve to Aid Disaster Response
Access to federal computing resources can help research communities provide
significant societal benefits during and after natural and manmade catastrophes.
However, determining how such resources should be allocated and managed can be
complex. This summary describes a tabletop exercise where experts discussed how
to harness Federal computing resources for relevant research communities during
two hypothetical disasters.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, public-private
high-performance computing resources proved
invaluable. These resources, assembled under
the name of the High-Performance Computing
Consortium (HPCC), contributed to various
research projects (e.g., potential drug therapies,
air flow simulations and hospital usage models)
between 2020 and 2022. In 2024, stakeholders
within the federal government, national
laboratories, and academia gathered to conduct
a tabletop exercise (TTX), applying the
principles of the HPCC to broader hypothetical
disasters. The results of these scenarios, captured
in a recent report by IDA researchers Dylan
Cohen and Kush Patel, have far-reaching
implications for how federal computing
resources should be used before, during and
after disasters.
After the success of the HPCC, officials within
the National Science Foundation called for a
more permanent body that captured the goals,
values and approaches of this early 2020s
concept. The National Science and Technology
Council consequently issued a blueprint for a
National Strategic Computing Reserve (NSCR)
with the purpose of organizing contributions
from agencies including relevant data, a trained
workforce, consistent communications,
