As we noted yesterday, the National Science Foundation does quite well in the President’s FY 2008 Budget Request, slated to grow 6.8 percent over FY 2007 (or nearly $409 million) to $6.4 billion. That growth rate would continue NSF on the 10-year “doubling” trajectory originally set by the Administration as part of last year’s American Competitiveness Initiative. The news for the computing community that is so heavily reliant on NSF is equally good — both the Computing and Information Science and Engineering directorate and the Office of Cyberinfrastructure would see big gains in the President’s plan. Here are the details (brace for charts):

First, the macro level view of the agency:

As you can see, the great bulk of the Administration’s planned increase is aimed at the Research and Related Activities (R&RA) account, home of NSF’s research directorates. The agency’s education efforts — in the Education and Human Resources directorate — would also see an increase, though not nearly as robust as R&RA. Of particular interest to those of us in the computing community, NSF is using some of the increase provided by ACI on a new NSF-wide initiative called “Cyber-enabled Discovery and Innovation” (CDI) that aims to “broaden the Nation’s capability for innovation by developing a new generation of computationally based discovery concepts and tools to deal with complex, data-rich and interacting systems.” The $52 million initiative will be led by NSF’s CISE directorate (who will control $20 million of the funding), with participation from Engineering, Mathematics and Physical Science, Social, Behavioral and Economic science, Cyberinfrastructure, International Science, and EHR. The agency appears to have big plans for the initative, projecting out-year funding growing to $250 million in FY 2012 (with CISE hopefully maintaining a proportional share).

Drilling down a little further, here’s the Directorate by Directorate breakdown within R&RA:

The increases weren’t evenly distributed throughout the directorates. Of the research directorates, CISE would see the largest percentage increase. In fact, the 9 percent requested growth rate is the largest for the directorate in seven years. Here’s how CISE plans to spend the funding:

Deborah Crawford, the acting AD for CISE, highlighted a number of new programs the new funding — and funding freed up as the ITR program comes to an end — would allow the directorate to pursue. First is an emphasis on “Discovery Research for Innovation,” which includes these new efforts:

• High Risk, High Return Research ($50 million) — “Seeking Big Ideas in support of Grand Vision.” Programs in the area will focus on fundamental questions in computing, larger projects, and try to exploit the potential of emerging technologies.
• Cyber-enabled Discovery and Innovation ($20 million) — As detailed above, CISE will lead this NSF-wide effort, focusing on promoting computational thinking for problem solving.

In addition, CISE will continue its support for planning of the Global Environment for Networking Innovations with $20 million in funding for pre-construction planning. GENI was also included in the Foundation’s 2007 Facility plan as the first “Horizon” project — a step away from “Readiness Stage,” which would allow for extensive pre-construction planning. GENI is one of 10 projects listed as “Horizon” projects. (There’s just one project in the Readiness Stage in FY 2008 — the Advanced Technology Solar Telescope — and just one that is listed as a possible new start in FY 2008 (the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory)).

The budget also includes statistics on the number of awards and the funding rate estimates for the directorate in FY 06, 07 and 08. The directorate estimates it will fund fewer research grants in FY 07 than it did in FY 06 (950 in FY07 vs 1,003 in FY06), with a corresponding drop in funding rate (18 percent in FY07 vs 22 percent in FY06). For FY08, the directorate expects the number of research grants to grow to 1,000 and the funding rate to rise a bit to 20 percent.

Despite those figures, this is, overall, a very promising start for computing at NSF in FY 2008 — which, given NSF’s role in funding 87 percent of academic basic research in computing, makes it a good start for the field.