Update: (12/17/07 1:30 pm) — It appears this bill is even worse than we initially thought. It turns out that the 3.3 percent increase for NSF’s research accounts (“Research and Related Activities”) is artificially inflated by some bookkeeping — namely the shifting of the EPSCoR program from the Education and Human Resources directorate to R&RA. Taking that shift into account, there’s really only $57 million in “new” funding in the R&RA account — a terribly anemic 1.2 percent increase for the research portion of the only federal agency devoted to supporting basic research. When you factor in inflation, that 1.2 percent really represents a cut — and a complete reversal of the goals of the ACI, the COMPETES Act, and the innovation plans so touted by the congressional leadership….. Original Post: Having gotten a peek at the final details for what will end up in the omnibus appropriations bill the House will consider Tuesday, I’m a bit dismayed at the choices that have been made. (Congressional Quarterly has the details; unfortunately, you’ll need a subscription to access them. The House Rules Committee has the text of the agreement online now.)
Those who have been following the saga that is the FY 08 appropriations process will recall that the total spending in the appropriations bills left unfinished by Congress (which included everything but Defense) exceeded the President’s budget request by $23 billion, a figure that brought out the President’s veto threat. The Democratic leadership tried to assess that threat by passing a Labor/HHS/Education bill they knew he would veto. When he vetoed it and the Congress failed to override it, it was clear who held the power in the negotiation. So, realizing they didn’t have the leverage they needed, the Democratic leadership began to cut back. They attempted to meet the President halfway with an omnibus that proposed an $11 billion cap overrun, but when they couldn’t peel off enough GOP members to override any potential veto, they caved completely, agreeing to live within the President’s budget cap for all the unfinished appropriations bills.
Unfortunately for the National Science Foundation and National Institute for Standards and Technology — two agencies that had been at the focal point of the President’s American Competitiveness Initiative and the Democratic Innovation Agenda — living under the cap meant that other programs within the omnibus received higher priorities and the planned increases for those two science agencies were cut sharply.
NSF, which under the House and Senate appropriations plans approvedearlier in the year would have received either a 10 or 11 percent increase (respectively) over FY 07, will instead receive just 2.5 percent vs. FY 07 in the new omnibus. NSF’s R&RA account (which funds the research directorates) will see just a 3.3 percent increase over FY 07 (instead of a planned 10.5 percent increase), should the omnibus pass.
NIST’s research efforts, which had been slated to grow over 15 percent vs. FY 07 in the House and Senate bills, will instead see that planned increase drop to just 1.4 percent over FY 07, should the bill pass.
DOE Office of Science fares a bit better — and DOE-related computing research comes out even further ahead in the deal. The Office of Science would have grown over 18 percent vs. FY 07 in the earlier House and Senate plans, but the new agreement will reduce that rate of increase to a still-respectable 6.8 percent. Advanced Scientific Computing Research, which had been slated to grow about 20 percent over FY07, would actually see *more* money in the new agreement — a growth of 25 percent over FY 07. Included in the increase is $19.5 million to “continue the Department’s participation in the [DARPA] High Productivity Computing Systems partnership” and an increase of $7.7 million for Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility to “maintain the planned budget and cost schedule.”
The agreement also includes details of an additional effort:
The Office of Science and the [NNSA] are directed to establish the Institute for Advanced Architectures and Algorithms with Centers of Excellence at Sandia National Labs and [ORNL]. These Centers will execute a national program involving industry, universities and national laboratories that is focused on technologies to sustain the U.S. leadership in high performance computing. The NNSA ASC and Office of Science ASCR programs will jointly fund the program and provide direction needed to support the goal of developing exascale computing for the Nation.
So, the House is set to begin consideration of the bill Tuesday. The Senate will get it as soon as the House passes it. It’s not clear whether the President will sign. There’s a core of the House GOP leadership that’s still not content with the limited spending in the omnibus. They’re leading an effort to push for a “Continuing Resolution” for FY 2008 (funding all agencies at their FY 07 levels) instead of the omnibus as a way of holding an even sharper line on spending. I suppose it’s possible that the President could veto the omnibus , and he could cite a lot of reasons — runaway earmarks, poor prioritization by congressional Democrats, the gutting of ACI — and the House GOP could force a CR by sustaining the veto. In that case, it would behoove the science advocacy community to push hard for special consideration of ACI-related agencies, as happened under the last CR. And it’s not implausible that GOP hard-liners might support it — after all, the real point of the CR would be to put a hold on earmarks. The science increases are, in fact, in the President’s budget.
But barring that somewhat unlikely chain of events — Presidential veto -> House GOP uphold veto and force CR -> CR favors ACI-related agencies — the ACI-related increases we’d hoped for at NSF and NIST appear to be lost. It’s hard not look for those to blame. The Democratic leadership is certainly open to some criticism for these numbers. When push came to shove and they were forced to live within the President’s budget constraints, the leadership didn’t feel that preserving the increases for science funding rose to a high enough priority in the face of other increases for programs and earmarks elsewhere in the omnibus. At the same time, the inability to put together appropriations bills that could garner enough support to pass with sufficient support isn’t unique to their leadership. You’ll recall the FY 07 appropriations process, managed by the GOP, also melted down in spectacular fashion.
In any case, this is a very disappointing development. Failing to get this bipartisan priority (President’s ACI, Democratic Innovation Agenda) funded — essentially abandoning science when it counted — only puts at risk our long-term competitiveness. It’s especially disappointing when one considers how many voices from all sides of the political spectrum have weighed in in support bolstering federal science funding, when the Administration has seen fit to make it a Presidential priority, and when Congress has emphasized its commitment with the passage of a landmark competitiveness bill in overwhelmingly bipartisan fashion.
So, it’s hard to imagine what else can be done. The debate over funding for FY 08 is much much larger than science funding. The issues that led to the meltdown are heavily political and have considerations that outweigh anything the science community could bring to the table. But, this is certainly a step back, I think, from science’s standing in the Congress at the beginning of this year, when it was granted special status in the CR for FY 07.
Though it certainly gives us a rallying cry for FY 09.
We’ll have more details as the omnibus moves forward and a final breakdown of the agency-by-agency numbers when they’re passed.
The Task Force on the Future of American Innovation, of which CRA is a very active member, hosted another successful competitiveness briefing on Capitol Hill today. A full room heard from Senator Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) and Senator Lamar Alexander (R-TN), an introduction by the president of the National Academy of EngineeringDr. Charles Vest, and a keynote address by Norm Augustine. Also, in attendance was Representative Frank Wolf (R-VA) who has backed the issue of increased basic research funding since before the “Rising Above the Gathering Storm” report was released.
Senator Bingaman echoed Dr. Vest when he said that the difficult work was still ahead because the current appropriations meltdown. He also said that the efforts of competitiveness were a long-term project. Senator Alexander said that it was important to continue to broaden the base of support for competitiveness issues in Congress but that it would be a mistake to think this issue was solely the responsibility of Congress. He said that everyone needs to be involved in order to keep America competitive.
Norm Augustine, who in addition to chairing the National Academies panel that produced the hugely influential “Rising Above the Gathering Storm” report and has since chaired a follow-up called Is America Falling off the Flat Earth?, pointed out that while great progress was made toward funding basic research in the FY07 appropriations, sustaining the momentum of increases in FY08 was critical. He said, Leadership in science and technology is not a birthright of the United States but is something that needs to be fought for and won every day. An interesting statistic that he used was that two-thirds of the increased labor productivity over the last several decades was contributable to federal investment in research.
The event ended with a screening of the Task Force YouTube contest winning video that weve previously mentioned here.
The new Bureau of Labor Statisticslabor projections are out for the 2006-2016 period, and once again, despite concerns over the impact of globalization, computing-related occupations are still projected to grow the quickest among all “professional and related occupations.” According to BLS projections, computer and mathematical science occupations are expected to grow by about 24 percent over the next decade, a rate that would add 822,000 new jobs to the field. Those 822,000 new jobs are third only to “Health care practitioners and technical occupations” (1,423,000 new jobs, a 19.8 percent growth rate) and “Education, training and library” occupations (1,265,000 new jobs, a 14 percent growth rate).
The Labor Department projections found that even though the growth rate for computer and mathematical science occupations has slowed compared to the previous decade — as the industry matures and “routine work is outsourced overseas” — strong growth in other aspects of computing will continue to create increasing opportunities in the field.
Computer and mathematical science occupations are projected to add 822,000 jobsat 24.8 percent, the fastest growth among the eight professional subgroups. The demand for computer-related occupations will increase in almost all industries as organizations continue to adopt and integrate increasingly sophisticated and complex technologies. Growth will not be as rapid as during the previous decade, however, as the software industry begins to mature and as routine work is outsourced overseas. About 291,000or 35 percentof all new computer and mathematical science jobs are anticipated to be in the computer systems design and related services industry. The management, scientific, and technical consulting services industry is projected to add another 86,000 computer and mathematical science jobs. This expected 93-percent increase is due to the growing need for consultants to handle issues such as computer network security. Self-employment among computer and mathematical workers is anticipated to increase 19 percent, with most growth appearing among network systems and data communications analysts.
The report projects that, of the six occupations that will be among the fastest growing and register the largest numerical growth, three will be computing related occupations:
Computer software engineers, application;
Computer systems analysts;
and Network systems and data communication analysts.
(The other three are “Home health aides,” “Medical assistants,” and “Personal and home care aides.”)
You can view most of the detail, including information about the methodology used, in the article titled, “Occupational employment projections to 2016” (pdf). The Monthly Labor Review Online has additional articles covering all aspects of the BLS’ employment outlook.
Projections are notoriously difficult to get right, obviously, but it’s encouraging to see that the opportunity that we in the community see in the field (that often runs counter to the *perceptions* of the field) appears to be echoed in these projections.
We’ll have much more detail as we dig into the articles and data a bit more, so stay tuned…. Update: (12/7/2007) — Here’s one interesting cut of the data showing how the computer science job projections compare to the other science and engineering disciplines. (This is also a good excuse for me to try out Google’s new Charts API.)
A Washington Postarticle today talks about the first petascale supercomputers expected to come online next year. The article points out the vast areas of other fields, which are assisted by computing at such a large scale including geography, medicine, and even financial markets. Heres a sample:
The first “petascale” supercomputer will be capable of 1,000 trillion calculations per second. That’s about twice as powerful as today’s dominant model, a basketball-court-size beast known as BlueGene/L at the Energy Department’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California that performs a peak of 596 trillion calculations per second.
The computing muscle of the new petascale machines will be akin to that of more than 100,000 desktop computers combined, experts say. A computation that would take a lifetime for a home PC and that can be completed in about five hours on today’s supercomputers will be doable in as little as two hours.
“The difficulty in building the machines is tremendous, and the amount of power these machines require is pretty mind-boggling,” said Mark Seager, assistant department head for advanced computing technology at Lawrence Livermore. “But the scientific results that we can get out of them are also mind-boggling and worth every penny and every megawatt it takes to build them.”
An interesting read and definitely worth checking out.
As NSFs Cyber-Enabled Discovery and Innovation (CDI) program heads toward its first deadline, the program staff will be launching a web cast on how to take advantage of this new cross-cutting funding initiative. The web cast will be held live on Thursday, November 29 from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. and program managers will be taking questions after a presentation on the program.
CDI is a five year initiative to fund research that uses computational thinking across all disciplines. The program includes all NSF Directorates and is focused on three theme areas: From Data to Knowledge; Understanding Complexity in Natural, Built, and Social Systems; and Building Virtual Organizations. The first deadline for letters of intent is November 30 and the first proposal deadline is January 8, 2008.
On Tuesday (Nov. 13th), the President signed the FY 2008 Defense Appropriations conference report, making that bill the first of the twelve FY 08 appropriations bills necessary to fund the continued operation of government to grind its way through to passage (it’s now P.L. 110-116). The Defense bill includes just over $77 billion in funding for Defense Research, Development, Testing and Evaluation (RDT&E), an increase of 2.0 percent over FY 07 and 2.9 percent above the President’s requested level for FY 08. Included within that RDT&E account are pretty substantial increases over the President’s request for basic and applied research efforts in some areas of interest to the computing community — and more modest growth in others. At the same time, overall funding for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), will see a decline in FY 08 vs both the President’s request and the FY 07 level.
We’ve whipped up a handy chart to show some of the detail for selected basic (6.1) and applied (6.2) research accounts. While the chart tells much of the story, it doesn’t explain everything going on with funding. For that, your best bet is to take a look at the conference report itself (pdf). The section of interest is “Title IV. Research, Development, Test and Evaluation,” that begins on page 243 of the PDF. It details the program level changes to each line item for the Army, Navy, Air Force and “Defense-wide” programs. It’s a lot to digest.
In general, what our chart above shows is that the research programs of note in the service labs got more than they asked for in FY 08, but that the defense-wide accounts (primarily DARPA) didn’t do quite as well. When you compare the funding levels to FY 07, the gains aren’t as significant (generally). But there’s a bit of a budget game going on here that tends to obfuscate actual gains and losses in each account. [Warning: budget wonkery follows.] As readers of this blog probably already know, the FY 07 level represents the funding level after Congress finished its work on last year’s DOD appropriations bill. The FY 07 final number represented an increase in most accounts over the President’s budget request for FY 07. The Administration labels most of those increases “earmarks,” especially if those increases are targeted to very specific programs or performers. When the President prepares his budget request for the next year (in this case, FY 08), he strips out as many of those “earmarks” as he can justify. This is why the defense request always seems like a cut compared to final enacted level for the previous year. As the request works its way through the appropriations process, the cycle repeats and much of that funding gets added back in by Congress, making it appear that there are increases in those accounts. And indeed there are…it’s just that many of those increases probably are earmarks for very specific programs or performers.
So, while these increases look pretty healthy when compared to the President’s budget request (shorn of earmarks, as it was) — and we certainly like to see more money in these accounts — ideally, we’d like to see those increases in the form of additional money for competitive, merit-based research funding. At this point, it’s tough to tell how much of these increases fit that description, at least in the 6.2 accounts. In the 6.1 accounts, it’s reasonable to assume that much of the increases found in the bill represent additional competitive funding.
One change to the appropriations bills this year has made it a bit easier to see who to credit for some of the increases to defense basic research accounts. New rules on transparency in the Senate mean that every change to the budget estimate called for in the bill gets credited to someone, so you can see who requested it in the Senate committee report. So, for example, we know that we owe thanks for the non-earmarked increases to the University Research Initiatives in the bill to Sens. Bayh (D-IN), Clinton (D-NY), Collins (R-ME), Johnson (D-SD), Kennedy (D-MA), Kerry (D-MA), Levin (D-MI), Leiberman (D-CT), Pryor (D-AR) and Stabenow (D-MI). Hopefully the House Appropriations Committee will follow through with “Requested by” language in their future bills. [end of budget wonkery]
Two accounts that don’t seem to fare particularly well in the bill are DARPA IT accounts — the Defense-wide Information and Communications Technology program (which will see a decline of 1.3 percent, about $3 million, vs. FY 07) and Cognitive Computing (which will see a decline of about 2.7 percent, or $4.9 million) in FY 08. As you can see in the chart, compared to the President’s budget request, ICT will increase slightly (0.9 percent, or $2.1 million), and Cognitive Computing will decline slightly (2.2 percent, or $3.9 million). Much of the reason for this decline is attributed to an “execution adjustment” by the appropriations committees. In other words, DARPA wasn’t spending the money it had previously been appropriated in a timely enough fashion, so the appropriators adopted a “use it or lose it” mindset and “reclaimed” that money for other accounts in the bill.
This is the same reasoning for much of the overall cut to DARPA in the bill. DARPA will see a decrease of $135 million vs. FY 07, or about 4.3 percent less in FY 08. Compared to the President’s request for FY 08, the agency will see a $106 million cut, or 3.4 percent. The appropriators and the DARPA leadership are of two minds on the reasons for slow spend-out rate for some DARPA programs. The DARPA leadership contends it’s acting as a good steward of taxpayer dollars, only paying grant-recipients when key milestones are met. However, the appropriators (and some on the Armed Services Committees, as well), contend that what’s really happening is a bottleneck in the Director’s office — that micromanagement of programs is slowing execution. Regardless of the actual cause, the fact remains that DARPA isn’t spending all the money it’s been appropriated and so the appropriators — who control the purse strings — have adjusted DARPA’s budget accordingly.
With the Defense bill finished, Congress is left with 11 bills to complete before closing the book on FY 2008. Only one other bill, the Labor/HHS/Ed appropriations, has been sent to the President, and it was promptly vetoed (a veto subsequently upheld, just barely, in the House). The Labor/HHS/Ed bill, which includes funding for the National Insitutes of Health and the Department of Education, came in about $9.8 billion over the President’s desired “cap” for the bill, earning his veto, and Congressional Democrats weren’t able to entice enough Republican members to vote to override (they fell 2 votes short in the House). The Democratic leadership figures to attempt to meet the President “halfway” with an omnibus package of unfinished bills before the year’s end, but it’s not clear whether they’ll get sufficient Republican support to force a compromise. It’s also not clear what a “halfway” package might mean for the hard-won gains for science contained in some of the unfinished bills, including the Commerce, Science, Justice bill (House / Senate).
Congress has until December 14th before it will have to pass yet another stopgap spending bill to keep the government operating (the Defense Approps bill included a “continuing resolution” to keep government operating without additional appropriations through Dec 14th — the FY 08 fiscal year began Oct 1, 2007.) Whether they manage a compromise by then is anyone’s guess, but the consensus around town is a deal is likely by Christmas. And when it happens, we’ll have all the detail here.
Computing pioneer Jim Gray, who went missing at sea January 28, 2007, and has not been found, will be honored with a tribute at U.C. Berkeley on March May 31, 2008. The tribute will have both a general session and a technical session. The technical session will feature presentations on a range of research areas important to Jim. The general session will focus on understanding Jim’s impact on the field and on the community — from his impact on Berkeley, his role as a mentor to colleagues, faculty and students, to his contributions to industry and to science. See the tribute home page for details of all the speakers.
Though the search for Jim Gray brought together an incredible array of people and technology — almost all inspired by Jim or his work — unfortunately he remains missing. After more than a year without him, this tribute seems like an appropriate way to honor and remember what Jim means to the discipline and to the community of science.
Every six months, the folks at Top500.org put together what has become the most-recognized metric of supercomputing speed and power, the Top 500 list. While there’s ongoing debate about the meaning and value of a top 500 ranking, it’s proven to be the most often-cited guide to where the “big iron” really is — touted by vendors, researchers, agencies, even policymakers as a way to demonstrate their high-performance computing capabilities.
The newest ranking, released at this week’s SC07 conference in Reno, Nevada, struck me as noteworthy because of the sites ranked in the Top 5. In the last ranking back in June 2007, the top 5 sites were all in the U.S. — 4 DOE Labs and IBM’s Watson Research Center. In the latest ranking, only two U.S. sites rank in the top 5 — DOE’s Lawrence Livermore National Lab (it’s BlueGene/L machine is #1) and the New Mexico Computing Applications Center (an SGI machine at #3). The other three are Germany’s Foshungszentrum Juelich (another BlueGene machine at #2), India’s Computational Research Laboratories (an HP cluster at #4), and a classified machine at a Swedish government agency (another HP cluster at #5).
I don’t want to draw any huge conclusions from this about the state of U.S. HPC efforts — after all, all the machines in the top 5 (indeed in the Top 15) are manufactured by U.S.-based companies (though the Indian machine apparently makes use of their own “innovative routing technology”). But if nothing else, this appears to demonstrate a commitment by these other countries — all competitors in the global economy — to really strong investments in HPC technologies. It represents further capacity-building on their part, the recognition that in order to compete, they must compute (to steal a catchphrase from the Council on Competitiveness).
As we look for ways to benchmark U.S. competitiveness and judge where future trends will take us, taking note of our competitors investments in high-performance computing ought to factor in pretty heavily, I think. That said, the U.S. continues to do pretty well in investing in HPC.
Last July, or maybe even a bit earlier, the members of the Task Force on the Future of American Innovation — an organization of high-tech companies and academic societies (CRA is a member) devoted to increasing federal support for basic research in the physical sciences, mathematics, computing and engineering — looked ahead at the calendar and realized that in a few short months the anniversary of one of the most significant events in world history would be upon them. The launch of Sputnik on October 4, 1957 changed the landscape for science and engineering in the U.S. by forcing a focus on improvements to our science and engineering to “close the gap” with the Soviets (whether there really was a gap at the time…a subject for someone else’s post). Sputnik led to a significant investment in space-related research and engineering, of course, but it also — and maybe more importantly — led to a overall buttressing of the science and engineering ecosystem in the United States. The payoff of that support over the last 50 years has been the United States’ leadership position in the global economy, the high standard of living for our citizens, and the dominance of our military. Given the focus of the Task Force, it seemed appropriate to find ways to commemorate the anniversary and the launch’s impact.
One of the ideas tossed around was that the Task Force should get a little Web 2.0-ish and sponsor a video contest on YouTube: create a 3-minute video showcasing how federally funded research has changed American life. The winner would get $1,000, plus an all-expense paid trip to Washington, DC, to watch as their video was played a Capitol Hill event.
Now, I like to think that I’m a pretty web-savvy guy — I twitter; I’ve got a TumbleLog — but I wasn’t at all convinced that this contest would amount to much at all. I could only imagine the sort of the entries that this contest, once unleashed on the YouTube community, might inspire. I was less convinced after my colleagues on the Task Force created the video announcing the contest. I respect the Task Force members as ardent and effective advocates for science, but, uh, videographers we’re not. And the first entry to the contest didn’t give me much hope.
But we let the contest play out and, remarkably, some good stuff started coming in. A few teams really took some time to <a href=come upwithinterestingapproaches. And the eventual contest winner’s was just outstanding:
(The director/creator of the video is Adan Vielma, a Junior at Lewis and Clark College in Oregon. He says he spent only 14 hours creating the images and putting it all together.)
Vielma attended a screening of his video at a November 8th briefing of the Congressional R&D Caucus, hosted by Representatives Rush Holt (D-NJ) and Judy Biggert (R-IL), as part of an event called “Sputnik in a YouTube Age.” The event, sponsored by the Task Force, featured remarks by two former NASA astronauts — Mae Jameison, the first African-American woman in space, and Kathryn Sullivan, the first U.S. woman to spacewalk — focusing on how Sputnik marked the beginning of an investment in science and math that led to the greatest explosion of scientific advancement the world had ever seen. The event, held on an otherwise busy Thursday, was absolutely packed, and I have to think a large part of the draw was the novelty of seeing the YouTube submissions.
So maybe we’ll have to explore other Web 2.0-ish ways of making our case…. A Googlemap mashup of innovation? Best innovation-oriented Facebook App? We’ll see.
On December 3, I will embark on the next installment of my own future, which will place me in the center of the ever-evolving computing revolution. On that day, I will be joining Microsoft to head a new research initiative (see the Microsoft Research press release and RENCI/UNC press release) in scalable and multicore computing. I am enormously excited, as these are among the most interesting technical problems in computing, and they are my long-time professional interests. I will be working with Microsoft researchers and product developers, as well as industry partners and academics. It doesnt get any cooler than this.
Check the post for a bunch more detail on the move. Congrats, Dan!
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NSF, NIST Lose Out in Final (?) Omnibus
/In: American Competitiveness Initiative, Funding, FY08 Appropriations, Policy /by Peter HarshaUpdate: (12/17/07 1:30 pm) — It appears this bill is even worse than we initially thought. It turns out that the 3.3 percent increase for NSF’s research accounts (“Research and Related Activities”) is artificially inflated by some bookkeeping — namely the shifting of the EPSCoR program from the Education and Human Resources directorate to R&RA. Taking that shift into account, there’s really only $57 million in “new” funding in the R&RA account — a terribly anemic 1.2 percent increase for the research portion of the only federal agency devoted to supporting basic research. When you factor in inflation, that 1.2 percent really represents a cut — and a complete reversal of the goals of the ACI, the COMPETES Act, and the innovation plans so touted by the congressional leadership…..
Original Post: Having gotten a peek at the final details for what will end up in the omnibus appropriations bill the House will consider Tuesday, I’m a bit dismayed at the choices that have been made. (
Congressional Quarterly has the details; unfortunately, you’ll need a subscription to access them.The House Rules Committee has the text of the agreement online now.)Those who have been following the saga that is the FY 08 appropriations process will recall that the total spending in the appropriations bills left unfinished by Congress (which included everything but Defense) exceeded the President’s budget request by $23 billion, a figure that brought out the President’s veto threat. The Democratic leadership tried to assess that threat by passing a Labor/HHS/Education bill they knew he would veto. When he vetoed it and the Congress failed to override it, it was clear who held the power in the negotiation. So, realizing they didn’t have the leverage they needed, the Democratic leadership began to cut back. They attempted to meet the President halfway with an omnibus that proposed an $11 billion cap overrun, but when they couldn’t peel off enough GOP members to override any potential veto, they caved completely, agreeing to live within the President’s budget cap for all the unfinished appropriations bills.
Unfortunately for the National Science Foundation and National Institute for Standards and Technology — two agencies that had been at the focal point of the President’s American Competitiveness Initiative and the Democratic Innovation Agenda — living under the cap meant that other programs within the omnibus received higher priorities and the planned increases for those two science agencies were cut sharply.
NSF, which under the House and Senate appropriations plans approved earlier in the year would have received either a 10 or 11 percent increase (respectively) over FY 07, will instead receive just 2.5 percent vs. FY 07 in the new omnibus. NSF’s R&RA account (which funds the research directorates) will see just a 3.3 percent increase over FY 07 (instead of a planned 10.5 percent increase), should the omnibus pass.
NIST’s research efforts, which had been slated to grow over 15 percent vs. FY 07 in the House and Senate bills, will instead see that planned increase drop to just 1.4 percent over FY 07, should the bill pass.
DOE Office of Science fares a bit better — and DOE-related computing research comes out even further ahead in the deal. The Office of Science would have grown over 18 percent vs. FY 07 in the earlier House and Senate plans, but the new agreement will reduce that rate of increase to a still-respectable 6.8 percent. Advanced Scientific Computing Research, which had been slated to grow about 20 percent over FY07, would actually see *more* money in the new agreement — a growth of 25 percent over FY 07. Included in the increase is $19.5 million to “continue the Department’s participation in the [DARPA] High Productivity Computing Systems partnership” and an increase of $7.7 million for Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility to “maintain the planned budget and cost schedule.”
The agreement also includes details of an additional effort:
So, the House is set to begin consideration of the bill Tuesday. The Senate will get it as soon as the House passes it. It’s not clear whether the President will sign. There’s a core of the House GOP leadership that’s still not content with the limited spending in the omnibus. They’re leading an effort to push for a “Continuing Resolution” for FY 2008 (funding all agencies at their FY 07 levels) instead of the omnibus as a way of holding an even sharper line on spending. I suppose it’s possible that the President could veto the omnibus , and he could cite a lot of reasons — runaway earmarks, poor prioritization by congressional Democrats, the gutting of ACI — and the House GOP could force a CR by sustaining the veto. In that case, it would behoove the science advocacy community to push hard for special consideration of ACI-related agencies, as happened under the last CR. And it’s not implausible that GOP hard-liners might support it — after all, the real point of the CR would be to put a hold on earmarks. The science increases are, in fact, in the President’s budget.
But barring that somewhat unlikely chain of events — Presidential veto -> House GOP uphold veto and force CR -> CR favors ACI-related agencies — the ACI-related increases we’d hoped for at NSF and NIST appear to be lost. It’s hard not look for those to blame. The Democratic leadership is certainly open to some criticism for these numbers. When push came to shove and they were forced to live within the President’s budget constraints, the leadership didn’t feel that preserving the increases for science funding rose to a high enough priority in the face of other increases for programs and earmarks elsewhere in the omnibus. At the same time, the inability to put together appropriations bills that could garner enough support to pass with sufficient support isn’t unique to their leadership. You’ll recall the FY 07 appropriations process, managed by the GOP, also melted down in spectacular fashion.
In any case, this is a very disappointing development. Failing to get this bipartisan priority (President’s ACI, Democratic Innovation Agenda) funded — essentially abandoning science when it counted — only puts at risk our long-term competitiveness. It’s especially disappointing when one considers how many voices from all sides of the political spectrum have weighed in in support bolstering federal science funding, when the Administration has seen fit to make it a Presidential priority, and when Congress has emphasized its commitment with the passage of a landmark competitiveness bill in overwhelmingly bipartisan fashion.
So, it’s hard to imagine what else can be done. The debate over funding for FY 08 is much much larger than science funding. The issues that led to the meltdown are heavily political and have considerations that outweigh anything the science community could bring to the table. But, this is certainly a step back, I think, from science’s standing in the Congress at the beginning of this year, when it was granted special status in the CR for FY 07.
Though it certainly gives us a rallying cry for FY 09.
We’ll have more details as the omnibus moves forward and a final breakdown of the agency-by-agency numbers when they’re passed.
Task Force Competitiveness Briefing
/In: American Competitiveness Initiative, FY08 Appropriations /by MelissaNorrThe Task Force on the Future of American Innovation, of which CRA is a very active member, hosted another successful competitiveness briefing on Capitol Hill today. A full room heard from Senator Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) and Senator Lamar Alexander (R-TN), an introduction by the president of the National Academy of Engineering Dr. Charles Vest, and a keynote address by Norm Augustine. Also, in attendance was Representative Frank Wolf (R-VA) who has backed the issue of increased basic research funding since before the “Rising Above the Gathering Storm” report was released.
Senator Bingaman echoed Dr. Vest when he said that the difficult work was still ahead because the current appropriations meltdown. He also said that the efforts of competitiveness were a long-term project. Senator Alexander said that it was important to continue to broaden the base of support for competitiveness issues in Congress but that it would be a mistake to think this issue was solely the responsibility of Congress. He said that everyone needs to be involved in order to keep America competitive.
Norm Augustine, who in addition to chairing the National Academies panel that produced the hugely influential “Rising Above the Gathering Storm” report and has since chaired a follow-up called Is America Falling off the Flat Earth?, pointed out that while great progress was made toward funding basic research in the FY07 appropriations, sustaining the momentum of increases in FY08 was critical. He said, Leadership in science and technology is not a birthright of the United States but is something that needs to be fought for and won every day. An interesting statistic that he used was that two-thirds of the increased labor productivity over the last several decades was contributable to federal investment in research.
The event ended with a screening of the Task Force YouTube contest winning video that weve previously mentioned here.
Computer and Mathematical Science Occupations Expected to Grow Quickest Over the Next Decade
/In: People /by Peter HarshaThe new Bureau of Labor Statistics labor projections are out for the 2006-2016 period, and once again, despite concerns over the impact of globalization, computing-related occupations are still projected to grow the quickest among all “professional and related occupations.” According to BLS projections, computer and mathematical science occupations are expected to grow by about 24 percent over the next decade, a rate that would add 822,000 new jobs to the field. Those 822,000 new jobs are third only to “Health care practitioners and technical occupations” (1,423,000 new jobs, a 19.8 percent growth rate) and “Education, training and library” occupations (1,265,000 new jobs, a 14 percent growth rate).
The Labor Department projections found that even though the growth rate for computer and mathematical science occupations has slowed compared to the previous decade — as the industry matures and “routine work is outsourced overseas” — strong growth in other aspects of computing will continue to create increasing opportunities in the field.
The report projects that, of the six occupations that will be among the fastest growing and register the largest numerical growth, three will be computing related occupations:
(The other three are “Home health aides,” “Medical assistants,” and “Personal and home care aides.”)
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You can view most of the detail, including information about the methodology used, in the article titled, “Occupational employment projections to 2016” (pdf). The Monthly Labor Review Online has additional articles covering all aspects of the BLS’ employment outlook.
Projections are notoriously difficult to get right, obviously, but it’s encouraging to see that the opportunity that we in the community see in the field (that often runs counter to the *perceptions* of the field) appears to be echoed in these projections.
We’ll have much more detail as we dig into the articles and data a bit more, so stay tuned….
Update: (12/7/2007) — Here’s one interesting cut of the data showing how the computer science job projections compare to the other science and engineering disciplines. (This is also a good excuse for me to try out Google’s new Charts API.)
Supercomputing Boost Expected Online Next Year
/In: R&D in the Press, Research /by MelissaNorrA Washington Post article today talks about the first petascale supercomputers expected to come online next year. The article points out the vast areas of other fields, which are assisted by computing at such a large scale including geography, medicine, and even financial markets. Heres a sample:
An interesting read and definitely worth checking out.
Cyber Enabled Discovery and Innovation Web Cast
/In: Events, Funding, Research /by MelissaNorrAs NSFs Cyber-Enabled Discovery and Innovation (CDI) program heads toward its first deadline, the program staff will be launching a web cast on how to take advantage of this new cross-cutting funding initiative. The web cast will be held live on Thursday, November 29 from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. and program managers will be taking questions after a presentation on the program.
CDI is a five year initiative to fund research that uses computational thinking across all disciplines. The program includes all NSF Directorates and is focused on three theme areas: From Data to Knowledge; Understanding Complexity in Natural, Built, and Social Systems; and Building Virtual Organizations. The first deadline for letters of intent is November 30 and the first proposal deadline is January 8, 2008.
FY 2008 Defense Appropriations Bill Passed
/In: Funding, FY08 Appropriations, Policy /by Peter HarshaOn Tuesday (Nov. 13th), the President signed the FY 2008 Defense Appropriations conference report, making that bill the first of the twelve FY 08 appropriations bills necessary to fund the continued operation of government to grind its way through to passage (it’s now P.L. 110-116). The Defense bill includes just over $77 billion in funding for Defense Research, Development, Testing and Evaluation (RDT&E), an increase of 2.0 percent over FY 07 and 2.9 percent above the President’s requested level for FY 08. Included within that RDT&E account are pretty substantial increases over the President’s request for basic and applied research efforts in some areas of interest to the computing community — and more modest growth in others. At the same time, overall funding for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), will see a decline in FY 08 vs both the President’s request and the FY 07 level.
We’ve whipped up a handy chart to show some of the detail for selected basic (6.1) and applied (6.2) research accounts. While the chart tells much of the story, it doesn’t explain everything going on with funding. For that, your best bet is to take a look at the conference report itself (pdf). The section of interest is “Title IV. Research, Development, Test and Evaluation,” that begins on page 243 of the PDF. It details the program level changes to each line item for the Army, Navy, Air Force and “Defense-wide” programs. It’s a lot to digest.
In general, what our chart above shows is that the research programs of note in the service labs got more than they asked for in FY 08, but that the defense-wide accounts (primarily DARPA) didn’t do quite as well. When you compare the funding levels to FY 07, the gains aren’t as significant (generally). But there’s a bit of a budget game going on here that tends to obfuscate actual gains and losses in each account. [Warning: budget wonkery follows.] As readers of this blog probably already know, the FY 07 level represents the funding level after Congress finished its work on last year’s DOD appropriations bill. The FY 07 final number represented an increase in most accounts over the President’s budget request for FY 07. The Administration labels most of those increases “earmarks,” especially if those increases are targeted to very specific programs or performers. When the President prepares his budget request for the next year (in this case, FY 08), he strips out as many of those “earmarks” as he can justify. This is why the defense request always seems like a cut compared to final enacted level for the previous year. As the request works its way through the appropriations process, the cycle repeats and much of that funding gets added back in by Congress, making it appear that there are increases in those accounts. And indeed there are…it’s just that many of those increases probably are earmarks for very specific programs or performers.
So, while these increases look pretty healthy when compared to the President’s budget request (shorn of earmarks, as it was) — and we certainly like to see more money in these accounts — ideally, we’d like to see those increases in the form of additional money for competitive, merit-based research funding. At this point, it’s tough to tell how much of these increases fit that description, at least in the 6.2 accounts. In the 6.1 accounts, it’s reasonable to assume that much of the increases found in the bill represent additional competitive funding.
One change to the appropriations bills this year has made it a bit easier to see who to credit for some of the increases to defense basic research accounts. New rules on transparency in the Senate mean that every change to the budget estimate called for in the bill gets credited to someone, so you can see who requested it in the Senate committee report. So, for example, we know that we owe thanks for the non-earmarked increases to the University Research Initiatives in the bill to Sens. Bayh (D-IN), Clinton (D-NY), Collins (R-ME), Johnson (D-SD), Kennedy (D-MA), Kerry (D-MA), Levin (D-MI), Leiberman (D-CT), Pryor (D-AR) and Stabenow (D-MI). Hopefully the House Appropriations Committee will follow through with “Requested by” language in their future bills. [end of budget wonkery]
Two accounts that don’t seem to fare particularly well in the bill are DARPA IT accounts — the Defense-wide Information and Communications Technology program (which will see a decline of 1.3 percent, about $3 million, vs. FY 07) and Cognitive Computing (which will see a decline of about 2.7 percent, or $4.9 million) in FY 08. As you can see in the chart, compared to the President’s budget request, ICT will increase slightly (0.9 percent, or $2.1 million), and Cognitive Computing will decline slightly (2.2 percent, or $3.9 million). Much of the reason for this decline is attributed to an “execution adjustment” by the appropriations committees. In other words, DARPA wasn’t spending the money it had previously been appropriated in a timely enough fashion, so the appropriators adopted a “use it or lose it” mindset and “reclaimed” that money for other accounts in the bill.
This is the same reasoning for much of the overall cut to DARPA in the bill. DARPA will see a decrease of $135 million vs. FY 07, or about 4.3 percent less in FY 08. Compared to the President’s request for FY 08, the agency will see a $106 million cut, or 3.4 percent. The appropriators and the DARPA leadership are of two minds on the reasons for slow spend-out rate for some DARPA programs. The DARPA leadership contends it’s acting as a good steward of taxpayer dollars, only paying grant-recipients when key milestones are met. However, the appropriators (and some on the Armed Services Committees, as well), contend that what’s really happening is a bottleneck in the Director’s office — that micromanagement of programs is slowing execution. Regardless of the actual cause, the fact remains that DARPA isn’t spending all the money it’s been appropriated and so the appropriators — who control the purse strings — have adjusted DARPA’s budget accordingly.
With the Defense bill finished, Congress is left with 11 bills to complete before closing the book on FY 2008. Only one other bill, the Labor/HHS/Ed appropriations, has been sent to the President, and it was promptly vetoed (a veto subsequently upheld, just barely, in the House). The Labor/HHS/Ed bill, which includes funding for the National Insitutes of Health and the Department of Education, came in about $9.8 billion over the President’s desired “cap” for the bill, earning his veto, and Congressional Democrats weren’t able to entice enough Republican members to vote to override (they fell 2 votes short in the House). The Democratic leadership figures to attempt to meet the President “halfway” with an omnibus package of unfinished bills before the year’s end, but it’s not clear whether they’ll get sufficient Republican support to force a compromise. It’s also not clear what a “halfway” package might mean for the hard-won gains for science contained in some of the unfinished bills, including the Commerce, Science, Justice bill (House / Senate).
Congress has until December 14th before it will have to pass yet another stopgap spending bill to keep the government operating (the Defense Approps bill included a “continuing resolution” to keep government operating without additional appropriations through Dec 14th — the FY 08 fiscal year began Oct 1, 2007.) Whether they manage a compromise by then is anyone’s guess, but the consensus around town is a deal is likely by Christmas. And when it happens, we’ll have all the detail here.
Berkeley to Hold a Tribute to Jim Gray
/In: People /by Peter HarshaComputing pioneer Jim Gray, who went missing at sea January 28, 2007, and has not been found, will be honored with a tribute at U.C. Berkeley on
MarchMay 31, 2008. The tribute will have both a general session and a technical session. The technical session will feature presentations on a range of research areas important to Jim. The general session will focus on understanding Jim’s impact on the field and on the community — from his impact on Berkeley, his role as a mentor to colleagues, faculty and students, to his contributions to industry and to science. See the tribute home page for details of all the speakers.Though the search for Jim Gray brought together an incredible array of people and technology — almost all inspired by Jim or his work — unfortunately he remains missing. After more than a year without him, this tribute seems like an appropriate way to honor and remember what Jim means to the discipline and to the community of science.
Top of the Top500 List More International
/In: Research /by Peter HarshaEvery six months, the folks at Top500.org put together what has become the most-recognized metric of supercomputing speed and power, the Top 500 list. While there’s ongoing debate about the meaning and value of a top 500 ranking, it’s proven to be the most often-cited guide to where the “big iron” really is — touted by vendors, researchers, agencies, even policymakers as a way to demonstrate their high-performance computing capabilities.
The newest ranking, released at this week’s SC07 conference in Reno, Nevada, struck me as noteworthy because of the sites ranked in the Top 5. In the last ranking back in June 2007, the top 5 sites were all in the U.S. — 4 DOE Labs and IBM’s Watson Research Center. In the latest ranking, only two U.S. sites rank in the top 5 — DOE’s Lawrence Livermore National Lab (it’s BlueGene/L machine is #1) and the New Mexico Computing Applications Center (an SGI machine at #3). The other three are Germany’s Foshungszentrum Juelich (another BlueGene machine at #2), India’s Computational Research Laboratories (an HP cluster at #4), and a classified machine at a Swedish government agency (another HP cluster at #5).
I don’t want to draw any huge conclusions from this about the state of U.S. HPC efforts — after all, all the machines in the top 5 (indeed in the Top 15) are manufactured by U.S.-based companies (though the Indian machine apparently makes use of their own “innovative routing technology”). But if nothing else, this appears to demonstrate a commitment by these other countries — all competitors in the global economy — to really strong investments in HPC technologies. It represents further capacity-building on their part, the recognition that in order to compete, they must compute (to steal a catchphrase from the Council on Competitiveness).
As we look for ways to benchmark U.S. competitiveness and judge where future trends will take us, taking note of our competitors investments in high-performance computing ought to factor in pretty heavily, I think. That said, the U.S. continues to do pretty well in investing in HPC.
Innovation Task Force Video Contest
/In: Events /by Peter HarshaLast July, or maybe even a bit earlier, the members of the Task Force on the Future of American Innovation — an organization of high-tech companies and academic societies (CRA is a member) devoted to increasing federal support for basic research in the physical sciences, mathematics, computing and engineering — looked ahead at the calendar and realized that in a few short months the anniversary of one of the most significant events in world history would be upon them. The launch of Sputnik on October 4, 1957 changed the landscape for science and engineering in the U.S. by forcing a focus on improvements to our science and engineering to “close the gap” with the Soviets (whether there really was a gap at the time…a subject for someone else’s post). Sputnik led to a significant investment in space-related research and engineering, of course, but it also — and maybe more importantly — led to a overall buttressing of the science and engineering ecosystem in the United States. The payoff of that support over the last 50 years has been the United States’ leadership position in the global economy, the high standard of living for our citizens, and the dominance of our military. Given the focus of the Task Force, it seemed appropriate to find ways to commemorate the anniversary and the launch’s impact.
One of the ideas tossed around was that the Task Force should get a little Web 2.0-ish and sponsor a video contest on YouTube: create a 3-minute video showcasing how federally funded research has changed American life. The winner would get $1,000, plus an all-expense paid trip to Washington, DC, to watch as their video was played a Capitol Hill event.
Now, I like to think that I’m a pretty web-savvy guy — I twitter; I’ve got a TumbleLog — but I wasn’t at all convinced that this contest would amount to much at all. I could only imagine the sort of the entries that this contest, once unleashed on the YouTube community, might inspire. I was less convinced after my colleagues on the Task Force created the video announcing the contest. I respect the Task Force members as ardent and effective advocates for science, but, uh, videographers we’re not. And the first entry to the contest didn’t give me much hope.
But we let the contest play out and, remarkably, some good stuff started coming in. A few teams really took some time to <a href=come up with interesting approaches. And the eventual contest winner’s was just outstanding:
(The director/creator of the video is Adan Vielma, a Junior at Lewis and Clark College in Oregon. He says he spent only 14 hours creating the images and putting it all together.)
Vielma attended a screening of his video at a November 8th briefing of the Congressional R&D Caucus, hosted by Representatives Rush Holt (D-NJ) and Judy Biggert (R-IL), as part of an event called “Sputnik in a YouTube Age.” The event, sponsored by the Task Force, featured remarks by two former NASA astronauts — Mae Jameison, the first African-American woman in space, and Kathryn Sullivan, the first U.S. woman to spacewalk — focusing on how Sputnik marked the beginning of an investment in science and math that led to the greatest explosion of scientific advancement the world had ever seen. The event, held on an otherwise busy Thursday, was absolutely packed, and I have to think a large part of the draw was the novelty of seeing the YouTube submissions.
So maybe we’ll have to explore other Web 2.0-ish ways of making our case…. A Googlemap mashup of innovation? Best innovation-oriented Facebook App? We’ll see.
Dan Reed Heads to Microsoft Research
/In: CRA, People /by Peter Harsha“Veteran supercomputing researcher” and current CRA Board Chair Dan Reed, will leave his position at the University of North Carolina’s Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) and join Microsoft Research on December 3rd, he announced today. From his blog post:
Check the post for a bunch more detail on the move. Congrats, Dan!