Many of the technologies we have at our fingertips take advantage of huge computer systems that crunch massive amounts of numbers. Take the weather app on your phone: to predict the weather in your home state (and even specifically your city), the weather across the world needs to be recorded and fed into a computer model that can take those millions of numbers and figure out how they will impact whether or not you need to take an umbrella to work today. Similarly, the airplanes we use to travel, and the jets that comprise our air force, make use of computer models that figure out how the air at high velocities will impact how bumpy your ride is. The ability to run these computer models is thanks to supercomputers: enourmous Costco-sized buildings full of stacks of computers that work together to process all of that data and transmit the results out to the world-and eventually your phone. Federal funding has a long history of supporting the development of the supercomputer, from the DARPA funded “ILLIAC IV” that was developed at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign in 1964, through the High Performance Computing Modernization Plan (HPCMP) of the 1990’s co-led by NSF and DARPA, up to modern day continuation of these programs involving NSF, DARPA, DOE, and multiple national labs. These efforts paved the way not just for the computers housed and used federally, but many of the same technology runs the servers that are used in private companies to house your email, connect you to social media, and many more.