In a growing number of problem domains urgent access to large-scale computation is required. In some cases, key decisions concerning life-threatening situations must be made quickly with the aid of modeling and simulation. In others, unique scientific opportunities may be lost without immediate access to supercomputers. For urgent computations, late results are useless results. Computer models must be run and the data analyzed while their predictions can still be applied or the opportunity is available.

These on-demand large-scale computations can't wait endlessly in a job queue for supercomputer resources to become available. Neither can the community keep multimillion-dollar infrastructures idle until required by urgent computation. We must leverage our existing investments in high-end computing and organize policies, tools, applications, workflows, and infrastructures to support urgent computing.

The workshop will bring together four communities:
Application scientists from a wide range of problem domains: earthquake,
wildfire, severe weather, transportation, epidemiology, economics, and
critical infrastructure.
HPC Resource providers and Grids such as TeraGrid, DOE, universities, and NASA.
Computer scientists and middleware providers.
Policy and resource allocation experts.

We anticipate approximately 30 attendees at the workshop.