There hasn’t been much discussion of this bill around town, but today Reps. Frank Wolf (R-VA), Chair of the Science, Justice, Commerce, State House Appropriations Subcommittee, and Vern Ehlers (R-MI), Chair of the Environment, Technology and Standards House Science Subcommittee, will introduce a bill aimed at increasing the number of students in math, science or engineering by forgiving interest on undergraduate student loans for students in those majors who agree to work five years in their fields upon graduate. From the release:
While the need for science and engineering positions in the United States has grown five times the rate of the civilian workforce as a whole since 1980, U.S. colleges and universities have experienced a steady decline in the number of American students earning science and engineering degrees. In 2000, Asian universities accounted for almost 1.2 million of the world’s science and engineering degrees, European universities (including Russia and eastern Europe) accounted for 850,000 and North American universities accounted for only about 500,000, according to the most recent statistics available to the National Science Foundation.
America’s advantage in science is slipping. This bill is aimed at reversing that trend by attracting and retaining more math, science and engineering undergraduate students.
The press conference (at 1 pm today, outside the Capitol) will bring together Former House Speaker Newt Gingrinch, who wrote about this idea in his recent book, the two congressmen, and Alan Merten, President of George Mason University.
Apparently Wolf was motivated in part by trends he saw presented in a Task Force of the Future of American Innovation report called Benchmarking our Innovation Future (pdf). (CRA is a member of the Task Force.) We’ve covered the report, most recently here.
The benchmarks indicate that the U.S. is in danger of losing its leadership role in science and innovation, a position it has held with a firm grip since the end of World War II.
We’ll have more coverage on this as it moves forward, but in the meantime, here’s a copy of the draft version of the bill (pdf) (for those who like to pick through legislative language).
Washington Post science and technology writer Rick Weiss riffs off of the recent news that NASA plans to pull the plug on the Voyager missions to demonstrate that the U.S. support for research has become too mundane — too evolutionary rather than revolutionary, too focused on short-term gains versus long-term results. The two Voyager probes, three decades after being launched on their tour of the outer planets, are now tickling the edge of interstellar space and still sending back data. NASA’s FY 2006 budget request eliminates funding for the Voyager program and a suite of other space probes (total cost savings = $23 million in FY 06) as part of the agency’s effort to refocus on the President’s Moon/Mars initiative — an initiative that has led to significant cuts elsewhere in the agency as well. Unfortunately, the problems aren’t just limited to NASA:
It would be less disheartening if the move to kill the Voyager program were an isolated example. But the U.S. scientific enterprise is riddled with evidence that Americans have lost sight of the value of non-applied, curiosity-driven research — the open-ended sort of exploration that doesn’t know exactly where it’s going but so often leads to big payoffs. In discipline after discipline, the demand for specific products, profits or outcomes — “deliverables,” in the parlance of government — has become the dominant force driving research agendas. Instead of being exploratory and expansive, science — especially in the wake of 9/11 — seems increasingly delimited and defensive.
Take, for example, the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency — arguably the nation’s premier funder of unencumbered scientific exploration, whose early dabbling in computer network design gave rise to the Internet. Agency officials recently acknowledged to Congress that they were shifting their focus away from blue-sky research and toward goal-oriented and increasingly classified endeavors.
Similarly, in geology, scientists have for years sought funds to blanket the nation with thousands of sensors to create an enormous, networked listening device that might teach us something about how the earth is shifting beneath our feet. The system got so far as to be authorized by Congress for $170 million over five years, but only $16 million has been appropriated in the first three of those years and just 62 of an anticipated 7,000 sensors have been deployed. Only in fiscal 2006, thanks to the South Asian tsunami, is the program poised to get more fully funded — out of a narrow desire to better predict the effects of such disasters here.
The Department of Energy in February announced it is killing the so-called BTeV project at Fermilab in Batavia, Ill., one of the last labs in this country still supporting studies in high-energy physics. This field, once dominated by the United States, promises to discover in the next decade some of the most basic subatomic particles in the universe, including the first so-called supersymmetric particle — a kind of stuff that seems to account for the vast majority of matter in the universe but which scientists have so far been unable to put their fingers on.
“We seem to have reached a point where people are so overwhelmed by the problems we face, we’re not sure we really need more frontiers,” said Kei Koizumi of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, noting that the only segments of the nation’s research and development budget enjoying real growth are defense and homeland security.
We’ve covered the DARPA story and its impact on computer science research pretty extensively (latest here).
Anyway, it’s a good piece — it even starts with a Star Trek quote. Read it all here.
As the appropriations season gets underway in earnest, Representatives Vern Ehlers (R-MI) and Rush Holt (D-NJ) have once again begun their push to secure more funding for the National Science Foundation by asking fellow members of the House to urge the Chair and Ranking Member of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Science, State, Justice and Commerce to fund NSF at $6.1 billion in FY 2006 — an increase of $627 million over FY 2005 (11 percent). Ehlers and Holt have circulated a Dear Colleague (pdf) letter to the members of the House, laying out a concise case for NSF:
Advances in science and technology underpin our ability to meet many of the challenges that America faces today, including securing the homeland, preventing terrorism, fostering innovation and economic development, and educating our children to be able to compete in the knowledge-based, global economy. As a nation we must continue to invest in our scientific enterprise.
Supporting the National Science Foundation (NSF) is key to maintaining our preeminence in science and technology. NSF investments are aimed at the frontiers of science and engineering, where advances in fundamental knowledge drive innovation, progress, and productivity. NSF supports the education of scientists and engineers as well as the workforce of tommorrow — a workforce in which all workers, from office assistants to rocket scientists, will require basic math and science skills.
The Dear Colleague then asks the member to sign a letter (pdf) that will be delivered to Appropriations Subcommittee Chair Frank Wolf (R-VA) and Ranking Member Alan Mollohan (D-WV). That letter makes a more detailed case for NSF (it’s worth reading (pdf)).
Last year, Ehlers and Holt, with the help of the scientific community, were able to convince 157 of their colleagues (but only 41 Republicans) to sign a similar letter, which was a good symbolic result, but didn’t mitigate the 2 percent cut the agency suffered as a result of the FY 05 appropriations process. The hope this year is to encourage more members to sign on and greatly increase the number of Republicans…
…Which makes this a good time to consider — if you haven’t already — joining CRA’s Computing Research Advocacy Network (CRAN), our electronic mailing list that delivers timely information about key advocacy opportunities. CRA will once again be involved in this effort, and the CRAN will likely play a significant role. All the details to join are here! Update: (4:45 pm, 4/8/05) Corrected the count of GOP signers.
Just want to note that CRA-affiliate organization ACM’sU.S. Public Policy Committee (USACM) has crafted a sharp analysis of some of the technical pitfalls contained in the controversial Real ID Act, which attempts to set minimum standards for state driver’s licenses and an interstate compact to govern the sharing of driver’s license data between states. The bill has already passed the House and was included in a rider on a must-pass supplemental funding bill to be considered by the Senate. The Senate, however, has indicated they will strip the controversial bill from the supplemental they consider, guaranteeing a fight over the issue in conference.
Cameron Wilson has a summary of the situation as well as a copy of the letter USACM sent to Sen. Lamar Alexander, who recently expressed support for the concept of a national ID (but not this particular bill). USACM adds considerable value to the policy debate with this kind of analysis.
John Markoff writes in detail in Saturday’s NY Times about DARPA’s diminishing investment in university-based computer science research and its potential impact.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency at the Pentagon – which has long underwritten open-ended “blue sky” research by the nation’s best computer scientists – is sharply cutting such spending at universities, researchers say, in favor of financing more classified work and narrowly defined projects that promise a more immediate payoff.
Hundreds of research projects supported by the agency, known as Darpa, have paid off handsomely in recent decades, leading not only to new weapons, but to commercial technologies from the personal computer to the Internet. The agency has devoted hundreds of millions of dollars to basic software research, too, including work that led to such recent advances as the Web search technologies that Google and others have introduced.
The shift away from basic research is alarming many leading computer scientists and electrical engineers, who warn that there will be long-term consequences for the nation’s economy. They are accusing the Pentagon of reining in an agency that has played a crucial role in fostering America’s lead in computer and communications technologies.
“I’m worried and depressed,” said David Patterson, a computer scientist at the University of California, Berkeley who is president of the Association of Computing Machinery, an industry and academic trade group. “I think there will be great technologies that won’t be there down the road when we need them.”
Markoff’s piece is largely based on answers the agency provided the Senate Armed Services Committee in response to the committee’s questions about DARPA’s historical support of IT R&D and the role of universities. In their response, DARPA noted that their overall support for computer science activites has averaged $578 million a year (inflation adjusted) for the last 13 years and that university participation in that research over the last 4 years has plummeted. (Due to “data constraints” they don’t have figures prior to FY 01.) In FY 01, DARPA funded $546 million in IT research overall, $214 million in universities. By FY 2004, the overall funding had risen to $583 million, and the university share had dropped to $123 million.
DARPA cited five “factors for the decline”:
1. A change in emphasis in the high performance computing program from pure research to supercomputer construction;
2. Significant drop in unclassified information security research;
3. End of TIA-related programs in FY 2004 due to congressional decree, a move that cost universities “a consistent $11-12 million per year” in research funding;
4. Research into intelligent software had matured beyond the research stage into integration;
5. Classified funding for computer science-related programs increased markedly between FY 2001 and FY 2004, but Universities received none of this funding.
Essentially, they conceded that their focus in IT R&D is increasingly short-term (at least in the unclassified realm) and that universities are no longer significant performers of DARPA IT R&D (classified or unclassified). Not surprisingly, these are the two major concerns CRA has repeatedlycitedabouttheagency.
Anyway, the article is a must read. Update: (4/3/2005) – Noah Shactman at Defense Tech has a bit more: Darpa may be investing more in super-secret computer science research. But overall, the agency’s proposed classified budget has shrunk by over a third, a Congressional source tells Defense Tech.
Federal Computer Week has a depressing article today on the impact of recent and planned cuts to NASA’s IT programs. The agency’s IT R&D programs are due to decline $66 million in FY 2005, with a further cut of $89 million requested in the President’s FY 2006 budget — a figure that would represent a total cut of 60 percent since FY 2004. The Administration says that NASA’s investments in IT R&D in FY 2006 will be reduced across the board, largely due to redirected funding to the President’s Moon/Mars initiative and the Space Shuttle Return to Flight program — the same reason given for the FY 2005 cuts that are putting pressure on agency supercomputing efforts now.
FCW says the cuts in FY 05 will result in 15 to 20 layoffs of NASA Ames’ supercomputing staff and 20 to 25 layoffs in its robotics staff (currently at 70 and 100, respectively). Buyout packages are being offered.
Chris Knight, vice president for negotiations at Ames Federal Employees Union and a Computational Sciences Division employee, said the buyouts apply to all IT workers except three in visualization and robotics. But the amounts will not be enough to convince most people to leave, he said.
A lot of the research centers are being basically bled dry, Knight said.
For the last several years, CRA has provided an analysis of computing research in the Administration’s budget request for AAAS’ annual look at R&D in the President’s Budget Request. The book containing the CRA analysis won’t be available until April, but I thought I’d post some of the core of that effort here. After the jump (the “Continue Reading…” link below) you’ll find CRA’s look at the current policy environment — why we’re concerned about the significantly changed landscape for federal IT R&D funding, including an examination of DARPA’s diminished role and NSF’s enhanced one. When the book is released, I’ll post a link to it as well. CRA’s chapter is just one of 26 or so focused on just about every aspect of the overall R&D portfolio.
BBC coverage of the jump to 135.5 teraflops.
ZDNet has more.
The feat won’t show up on the current Top500.org list until they release the next revision of the list, which I think will be in May (the last was released in November at the Supercomputing 2004 conference in Pittsburgh, and it seems to be issued at six month intervals). Update: John West, Director of the ERDC MSRC — one of four DOD HPC program centers — e-mails with a helpful clarification:
Top500 lists are published twice a year: in June and in November. The November list is announced at the annual Supercomputing series of conferences (www.supercomp.org), which is probably part of the reason for its not-quite-six-months timing.
He also notes that the LINPACK score (upon which the Top500 list is based) isn’t the best way to assess a supercomputer’s relative benefit to a discipline, despite it’s popularity — something I probably should have noted in my post.
In my defense, as limited as the LINPACK score is in what it says about a particular machine, it is the one number most people out here (certainly in the policy world) cling to when trying to understand progress in supercomputing. Though it wasn’t the message we sought to convey, the fact that the Japanese Earth Simulator was X teraflops faster than our “best” machine certainly focused the mind of a lot of policymakers in Congress last year, for better or worse. In talking about high-end computing with them, we certainly tried not to emphasize that measure; rather, we tried to talk about the importance of a sustained research effort on a diverse set of approaches to enable progress on a wide range of different problems.
John also notes that there are some interesting efforts to develop a new metric coming out of DARPA’s HPCS program, but those measures are likely to be a bit more complex — almost certainly spelling doom for their adoption over the “one number fits all” of the LINPACK.
The long-awaited PITAC report on Cyber Security, Cyber Security: A Crisis of Prioritization (pdf, 2.2mb) has just been released. The committee spent nearly a year reviewing the federal government’s cyber security R&D effort, a process we’vecoveredinthis space. The resulting report concludes that the IT infrastructure — beyond the public Internet — is a crucial piece of the nation’s critical infrastructures, such as power grids, air traffic control systems, financial systems, and military and intelligence systems. Given it’s importance, the committee finds that the federal cyber security R&D investment is inadequate and “imbalanced” towards short-term, defense oriented research, with little support for fundamental research to address the larger vulnerabilities of the civilian IT infrastructure. As a result the committee recommends changes to the portfolio to:
Increase Federal support for fundamental research in civilian cyber security by $90 million annually at NSF and by substantial amounts at agencies such as DARPA and DHS to support work in 10 high-priority areas identified by PITAC.
Intensify Federal efforts to promote recruitment and retention of cyber security researchers and students at research universities, with an aim of doubling this professions numbers by the end of the decade.
Provide increased support for the rapid transfer of Federally developed cutting-edge cyber security technologies to the private sector.
Strengthen the coordination of the Interagency Working Group on Critical Information Infrastructure Protection and integrate it under the Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) Program.
I’ll have more detail on the report as I work my way through it, but wanted to get a link up to it ASAP. At 72 pages cover-to-cover, the report is a very revealing examination of the federal cyber security R&D portfolio. Update: (3/19/05) – The NY Times’ John Markoff has more on the report today, including this quote from PITAC co-Chair Ed Lazowska:
“The federal government is largely failing in its responsibility to protect the nation from cyberthreats,” said Edward D. Lazowska, chairman of the computer science and engineering department at the University of Washington and co-chairman of the panel. “The Department of Homeland Security simply doesn’t ‘get’ cybersecurity. They are allocating less than 2 percent of their science and technology budget to cybersecurity, and only a small proportion of this is forward-looking.”
Michelle Petrovich, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, disputed the criticism. “We take cybersecurity seriously and have taken aggressive measures to address various needs,” she said. “Our cybersecurity budget has gone up every year.”
For the record, it may be true that DHS’ overall budget for “cyber security” activities has gone up, but cyber security R&D — the focus of this report and, one would think, a focus of the DHS Science and Technology directorate — has actually been flat at DHS for the last two fiscal years at a paltry $18 million out of an overall S&T budget of just about $1 billion per year. And of that tiny share only $1.5 million could truly be called “long-term” research — research beyond patching the holes in the current systems. As the report points out, without research into fundamentally new approaches, we’ll be “endlessly patching and plugging holes in the dike” for years to come. It’s also worth noting that the President’s budget for cyber security research at DHS this year actually takes a step backwards. For FY 2006, the President’s budget would cut cyber security R&D at the agency to $17 million, a decrease of $1 million from FY 2005….
The House Science Committeemarked up a series of bills today including H.R. 28, the High Performance Computing Revitalization Act, a bill we covered in depth last year when it was introduced as H.R. 4218. CRA endorsed that bill, and has endorsed H.R. 28. Here’s a summary of today’s activities from the House Science Committee press release.
The bill, which was introduced by Energy Subcommittee Chairman Judy Biggert (R-IL), Representative Lincoln Davis (D-TN), and Chairman Boehlert, would strengthen U.S. supercomputing capabilities by requiring NSF and DOE to ensure U.S. researchers access to high-performance computers, and by prescribing a comprehensive, balanced approach to the nation’s computing strategy. It would also place responsibility with the Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy to ensure a coordinated, on-going effort among the federal agencies that have a role in high-performance computing. An earlier version of the bill was endorsed by the Bush Administration at a May 13, 2004 Full Committee hearing.
By voice vote, the Committee agreed to an amendment offered by Chairman Biggert that added a finding that emphasizes the importance of commercial application of the results of federal investment in computer science. By a vote of 19 to 17, the Committee rejected an amendment offered by Representative Brad Sherman (D-CA) that would have added a requirement that the National Science Foundation support research into the implications of computers that would be capable of mimicking human abilities to learn, reason, and make decisions.
The Sherman amendment was agreed to by the Committee in the 108th, Congress. Explaining the Majority’s opposition today, Chairman Boehlert said, “We’ve learned that it is adamantly opposed by the bill’s sponsor who happens to be one of our subcommittee chairs. We’ve learned that it is adamantly opposed by both industry and the Administration. We’ve learned that it is an obstacle to dealing with the Senate. And we learned all that the hard way while keeping to our agreement by trying to get this language through on another bill – Mrs. Biggert’s Energy Department computing bill that we got signed into law last year. Now I might be willing to continue to support this amendment despite all that if I thought that it dealt with a crucial and pressing problem. But it doesn’t. All the experts tell us we are nowhere near creating the dystopia that Mr. Sherman fears.”
From here, the bill will advance to the House floor where it’s expected to pass without difficulty, as H.R. 4218 did last year. Unfortunately, the hurdle for reauthorizations of NITRD programs lately has been the U.S. Senate. As Boehlert noted, H.R. 4218 failed to receive consideration by the Senate in the 108th Congress, though that seemed related to time constraints rather than any substantive objection to the bill. Previous efforts in the 107th and 106th Congresses also met a similar fate. However, this time Science Committee staff are optimistic that the earlier start they’ve gotten introducing and marking up the bill combined with its uncontroversial nature (there are, for example, no dollar amounts included in the bill that might earn the wrath of budget hawks — or prove helpful to the computing community in making the case for funding to appropriators…) means that the bill has a serious shot gaining Senate approval.
We’ll keep an eye on all the developments here….
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Wolf/Ehlers To Introduce Bill to Assist Math, Science and Engineering Majors
/In: Funding /by Peter HarshaThere hasn’t been much discussion of this bill around town, but today Reps. Frank Wolf (R-VA), Chair of the Science, Justice, Commerce, State House Appropriations Subcommittee, and Vern Ehlers (R-MI), Chair of the Environment, Technology and Standards House Science Subcommittee, will introduce a bill aimed at increasing the number of students in math, science or engineering by forgiving interest on undergraduate student loans for students in those majors who agree to work five years in their fields upon graduate. From the release:
The press conference (at 1 pm today, outside the Capitol) will bring together Former House Speaker Newt Gingrinch, who wrote about this idea in his recent book, the two congressmen, and Alan Merten, President of George Mason University.
Apparently Wolf was motivated in part by trends he saw presented in a Task Force of the Future of American Innovation report called Benchmarking our Innovation Future (pdf). (CRA is a member of the Task Force.) We’ve covered the report, most recently here.
The benchmarks indicate that the U.S. is in danger of losing its leadership role in science and innovation, a position it has held with a firm grip since the end of World War II.
We’ll have more coverage on this as it moves forward, but in the meantime, here’s a copy of the draft version of the bill (pdf) (for those who like to pick through legislative language).
Washington Post OpEd: “Our Incredible Shrinking Curiosity”
/In: Funding, Policy, R&D in the Press /by Peter HarshaWashington Post science and technology writer Rick Weiss riffs off of the recent news that NASA plans to pull the plug on the Voyager missions to demonstrate that the U.S. support for research has become too mundane — too evolutionary rather than revolutionary, too focused on short-term gains versus long-term results. The two Voyager probes, three decades after being launched on their tour of the outer planets, are now tickling the edge of interstellar space and still sending back data. NASA’s FY 2006 budget request eliminates funding for the Voyager program and a suite of other space probes (total cost savings = $23 million in FY 06) as part of the agency’s effort to refocus on the President’s Moon/Mars initiative — an initiative that has led to significant cuts elsewhere in the agency as well. Unfortunately, the problems aren’t just limited to NASA:
We’ve covered the DARPA story and its impact on computer science research pretty extensively (latest here).
Anyway, it’s a good piece — it even starts with a Star Trek quote. Read it all here.
Reps. Ehlers and Holt Circulate Letter Urging Increased NSF Funding
/In: Funding /by Peter HarshaAs the appropriations season gets underway in earnest, Representatives Vern Ehlers (R-MI) and Rush Holt (D-NJ) have once again begun their push to secure more funding for the National Science Foundation by asking fellow members of the House to urge the Chair and Ranking Member of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Science, State, Justice and Commerce to fund NSF at $6.1 billion in FY 2006 — an increase of $627 million over FY 2005 (11 percent). Ehlers and Holt have circulated a Dear Colleague (pdf) letter to the members of the House, laying out a concise case for NSF:
The Dear Colleague then asks the member to sign a letter (pdf) that will be delivered to Appropriations Subcommittee Chair Frank Wolf (R-VA) and Ranking Member Alan Mollohan (D-WV). That letter makes a more detailed case for NSF (it’s worth reading (pdf)).
Last year, Ehlers and Holt, with the help of the scientific community, were able to convince 157 of their colleagues (but only 41 Republicans) to sign a similar letter, which was a good symbolic result, but didn’t mitigate the 2 percent cut the agency suffered as a result of the FY 05 appropriations process. The hope this year is to encourage more members to sign on and greatly increase the number of Republicans…
…Which makes this a good time to consider — if you haven’t already — joining CRA’s Computing Research Advocacy Network (CRAN), our electronic mailing list that delivers timely information about key advocacy opportunities. CRA will once again be involved in this effort, and the CRAN will likely play a significant role. All the details to join are here!
Update: (4:45 pm, 4/8/05) Corrected the count of GOP signers.
USACM Weighs in on Real ID Act
/In: Policy /by Peter HarshaJust want to note that CRA-affiliate organization ACM’s U.S. Public Policy Committee (USACM) has crafted a sharp analysis of some of the technical pitfalls contained in the controversial Real ID Act, which attempts to set minimum standards for state driver’s licenses and an interstate compact to govern the sharing of driver’s license data between states. The bill has already passed the House and was included in a rider on a must-pass supplemental funding bill to be considered by the Senate. The Senate, however, has indicated they will strip the controversial bill from the supplemental they consider, guaranteeing a fight over the issue in conference.
Cameron Wilson has a summary of the situation as well as a copy of the letter USACM sent to Sen. Lamar Alexander, who recently expressed support for the concept of a national ID (but not this particular bill). USACM adds considerable value to the policy debate with this kind of analysis.
Must Read: NY Times – “A Blow to Computer Science Research”
/In: Funding, Policy, R&D in the Press /by Peter HarshaJohn Markoff writes in detail in Saturday’s NY Times about DARPA’s diminishing investment in university-based computer science research and its potential impact.
Markoff’s piece is largely based on answers the agency provided the Senate Armed Services Committee in response to the committee’s questions about DARPA’s historical support of IT R&D and the role of universities. In their response, DARPA noted that their overall support for computer science activites has averaged $578 million a year (inflation adjusted) for the last 13 years and that university participation in that research over the last 4 years has plummeted. (Due to “data constraints” they don’t have figures prior to FY 01.) In FY 01, DARPA funded $546 million in IT research overall, $214 million in universities. By FY 2004, the overall funding had risen to $583 million, and the university share had dropped to $123 million.
DARPA cited five “factors for the decline”:
1. A change in emphasis in the high performance computing program from pure research to supercomputer construction;
2. Significant drop in unclassified information security research;
3. End of TIA-related programs in FY 2004 due to congressional decree, a move that cost universities “a consistent $11-12 million per year” in research funding;
4. Research into intelligent software had matured beyond the research stage into integration;
5. Classified funding for computer science-related programs increased markedly between FY 2001 and FY 2004, but Universities received none of this funding.
Essentially, they conceded that their focus in IT R&D is increasingly short-term (at least in the unclassified realm) and that universities are no longer significant performers of DARPA IT R&D (classified or unclassified). Not surprisingly, these are the two major concerns CRA has repeatedly cited about the agency.
Anyway, the article is a must read.
Update: (4/3/2005) – Noah Shactman at Defense Tech has a bit more: Darpa may be investing more in super-secret computer science research. But overall, the agency’s proposed classified budget has shrunk by over a third, a Congressional source tells Defense Tech.
Budget Cuts Mean Layoffs for Supercomputing Staff at NASA
/In: Funding, People, Policy, R&D in the Press /by Peter HarshaFederal Computer Week has a depressing article today on the impact of recent and planned cuts to NASA’s IT programs. The agency’s IT R&D programs are due to decline $66 million in FY 2005, with a further cut of $89 million requested in the President’s FY 2006 budget — a figure that would represent a total cut of 60 percent since FY 2004. The Administration says that NASA’s investments in IT R&D in FY 2006 will be reduced across the board, largely due to redirected funding to the President’s Moon/Mars initiative and the Space Shuttle Return to Flight program — the same reason given for the FY 2005 cuts that are putting pressure on agency supercomputing efforts now.
FCW says the cuts in FY 05 will result in 15 to 20 layoffs of NASA Ames’ supercomputing staff and 20 to 25 layoffs in its robotics staff (currently at 70 and 100, respectively). Buyout packages are being offered.
Read the whole article.
Concerns about the Status of the Federal Effort in IT R&D
/In: CRA, Funding, Policy /by Peter HarshaFor the last several years, CRA has provided an analysis of computing research in the Administration’s budget request for AAAS’ annual look at R&D in the President’s Budget Request. The book containing the CRA analysis won’t be available until April, but I thought I’d post some of the core of that effort here. After the jump (the “Continue Reading…” link below) you’ll find CRA’s look at the current policy environment — why we’re concerned about the significantly changed landscape for federal IT R&D funding, including an examination of DARPA’s diminished role and NSF’s enhanced one. When the book is released, I’ll post a link to it as well. CRA’s chapter is just one of 26 or so focused on just about every aspect of the overall R&D portfolio.
Read more →
DOE/IBM’s Blue Gene Nearly Doubles its Speed Record
/In: R&D in the Press, Research /by Peter HarshaBBC coverage of the jump to 135.5 teraflops.
ZDNet has more.
The feat won’t show up on the current Top500.org list until they release the next revision of the list, which I think will be in May (the last was released in November at the Supercomputing 2004 conference in Pittsburgh, and it seems to be issued at six month intervals).
Update: John West, Director of the ERDC MSRC — one of four DOD HPC program centers — e-mails with a helpful clarification:
He also notes that the LINPACK score (upon which the Top500 list is based) isn’t the best way to assess a supercomputer’s relative benefit to a discipline, despite it’s popularity — something I probably should have noted in my post.
In my defense, as limited as the LINPACK score is in what it says about a particular machine, it is the one number most people out here (certainly in the policy world) cling to when trying to understand progress in supercomputing. Though it wasn’t the message we sought to convey, the fact that the Japanese Earth Simulator was X teraflops faster than our “best” machine certainly focused the mind of a lot of policymakers in Congress last year, for better or worse. In talking about high-end computing with them, we certainly tried not to emphasize that measure; rather, we tried to talk about the importance of a sustained research effort on a diverse set of approaches to enable progress on a wide range of different problems.
John also notes that there are some interesting efforts to develop a new metric coming out of DARPA’s HPCS program, but those measures are likely to be a bit more complex — almost certainly spelling doom for their adoption over the “one number fits all” of the LINPACK.
PITAC Cyber Security Report is Out!
/In: R&D in the Press, Security /by Peter HarshaThe long-awaited PITAC report on Cyber Security, Cyber Security: A Crisis of Prioritization (pdf, 2.2mb) has just been released. The committee spent nearly a year reviewing the federal government’s cyber security R&D effort, a process we’ve covered in this space. The resulting report concludes that the IT infrastructure — beyond the public Internet — is a crucial piece of the nation’s critical infrastructures, such as power grids, air traffic control systems, financial systems, and military and intelligence systems. Given it’s importance, the committee finds that the federal cyber security R&D investment is inadequate and “imbalanced” towards short-term, defense oriented research, with little support for fundamental research to address the larger vulnerabilities of the civilian IT infrastructure. As a result the committee recommends changes to the portfolio to:
I’ll have more detail on the report as I work my way through it, but wanted to get a link up to it ASAP. At 72 pages cover-to-cover, the report is a very revealing examination of the federal cyber security R&D portfolio.
Update: (3/19/05) – The NY Times’ John Markoff has more on the report today, including this quote from PITAC co-Chair Ed Lazowska:
For the record, it may be true that DHS’ overall budget for “cyber security” activities has gone up, but cyber security R&D — the focus of this report and, one would think, a focus of the DHS Science and Technology directorate — has actually been flat at DHS for the last two fiscal years at a paltry $18 million out of an overall S&T budget of just about $1 billion per year. And of that tiny share only $1.5 million could truly be called “long-term” research — research beyond patching the holes in the current systems. As the report points out, without research into fundamentally new approaches, we’ll be “endlessly patching and plugging holes in the dike” for years to come. It’s also worth noting that the President’s budget for cyber security research at DHS this year actually takes a step backwards. For FY 2006, the President’s budget would cut cyber security R&D at the agency to $17 million, a decrease of $1 million from FY 2005….
House Science Passes HPC Authorization
/In: Policy /by Peter HarshaThe House Science Committee marked up a series of bills today including H.R. 28, the High Performance Computing Revitalization Act, a bill we covered in depth last year when it was introduced as H.R. 4218. CRA endorsed that bill, and has endorsed H.R. 28. Here’s a summary of today’s activities from the House Science Committee press release.
From here, the bill will advance to the House floor where it’s expected to pass without difficulty, as H.R. 4218 did last year. Unfortunately, the hurdle for reauthorizations of NITRD programs lately has been the U.S. Senate. As Boehlert noted, H.R. 4218 failed to receive consideration by the Senate in the 108th Congress, though that seemed related to time constraints rather than any substantive objection to the bill. Previous efforts in the 107th and 106th Congresses also met a similar fate. However, this time Science Committee staff are optimistic that the earlier start they’ve gotten introducing and marking up the bill combined with its uncontroversial nature (there are, for example, no dollar amounts included in the bill that might earn the wrath of budget hawks — or prove helpful to the computing community in making the case for funding to appropriators…) means that the bill has a serious shot gaining Senate approval.
We’ll keep an eye on all the developments here….