The Computing Research Association is pleased to announce the appointment of Dr. Edward Lazowska, Bill & Melinda Gates Chair in Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington, as the inaugural Chair of the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council. This appointment was made after extensive consultations with computing research leaders, the Interim CCC Council and the National Science Foundation.
“CRA is delighted that our colleague, Ed Lazowska, has accepted this important role” said Daniel A. Reed, Chair of the CRA Board and Director of the Renaissance Computing Institute at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
Dr. Lazowska has a distinguished career in computing research, public service, and service to the computing research community, including time spent as co-chair of the President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee and the Defense Advanced Projects Agency Information Science and Technology study group. Dr. Lazowska is a Member of the National Academy of Engineering, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, the Association for Computing Machinery, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
In his new role, Dr. Lazowska will lead the CCC — a consortium of experts drawn from and chosen by the computing research community — as it seeks to stimulate scientific leadership and vision on issues related to computing research and future large-scale computing research projects. The CCC, established by CRA in partnership with NSF, will catalyze the computing research community to debate long-range research challenges, to build consensus around research visions, to articulate those visions, and to develop the most promising visions into clearly defined initiatives. The next step in its implementation is populating the CCC Council, which will facilitate the processes by which the consortium will do its work.
About CRA. The CRA was established 30 years ago and has members at more than 250 research entities in academia, industry and government. Its mission is to strengthen research and advance education in the computing fields, expand opportunities for women and minorities, and improve public and policymaker understanding of the importance of computing and computing research in society.
For more on the CCC: http://www.cra.org/ccc Previous posts on the CCC.
Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft Corp, testified before the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee on competitiveness issues this morning. A web cast of the hearing is available here. He emphasized three areas: educating students and workers, immigration, and federal funding of basic research and R&D tax credit. His extensive written testimony (where he cites CRAs own Jay Vegso!) goes into great detail on each of these three issues.
Gates hit the competitiveness high notes that are found in the Rising Above the Gathering Storm and Tapping Americas Potential reports including recruiting more high school science and math teachers, doubling the number of math, science, and engineering graduates, increasing basic science R&D at the major research agencies by 10% over the next 7 years, and increasing visas for high skilled workers. He used computing as an example in both his oral and written testimony. His written testimony states:
We cannot possibly sustain an economy founded on technology pre-eminence without a citizenry educated in core technology disciplines such as mathematics, computer science, engineering, and the physical sciences. The economys need for workers trained in these fields is massive and growing. The U.S. Department of Labor has projected that, in the decade ending in 2014, there will be over two million job openings in the United States in these fields. Yet in 2004, just 11 percent of all higher education degrees awarded in the U.S. were in engineering, mathematics, and the physical sciences a decline of about a third since 1960.
Recent declines are particularly pronounced in computer science. The percentage of college freshmen planning to major in computer science dropped by 70 percent between 2000 and 2005.3 In an economy in which computing has become central to innovation in nearly every sector, this decline poses a serious threat to American competitiveness. Indeed, it would not be an exaggeration to say that every significant technological innovation of the 21st century will require new software to make it happen.
To combat this decline, Gates takes a recommendation straight from the Gathering Storm report and calls for 25,000 4-year undergraduate scholarships in the STEM fields. He also said that the opportunities for innovation in computing are greater than most people, especially students, realize.
The America COMPETES (Creating Opportunities to Meaningfully Promote Excellence in Technology, Education, and Science) Act will be introduced in the US Senate on Monday. The bill is a compilation of provisions and language from past innovation legislation like the National Competitiveness Investment Act, American Innovation and Competitiveness Act of 2006, and Protecting Americas Competitive Edge Through Energy Act of 2006. We don’t yet have a draft of the actual bill language, but a summary of the bill states: the America COMPETES Act focuses on three primary areas of importance to maintaining and improving United States innovation in the 21st Century: (1) increasing research investment, (2) strengthening educational opportunities in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics from elementary through graduate school, and (3) developing an innovation infrastructure.
Provisions in the bill include:
Double funding for NSF and Department of Energy Office of Science by FY2011
Direct federal agencies that fund S&T research to set a goal of 8% of their R&D budgets to fund high-risk frontier research
Authorize NIST at $937 million by FY2011 and requiring NIST to use a minimum of 8% of its funding for high-risk, high-reward research
Authorize competitive grants to States for elementary and secondary education alignment with the requirements of post-secondary education, the 21st century workforce, and the Armed Services
Establish training and education programs at summer institutes hosted at the National Laboratories and increase support for the Teacher Institutes for the 21st Century program at NSF
Expand the Robert Noyce Teacher Scholarship Program at NSF
Assist States in establishing or expanding statewide specialty schools in math and science that students from across the state would be eligible to attend and providing expert assistance in teaching from National Laboratories staff at those schools
Increase the number of teachers prepared to teach AP/IB and pre-AP/IB math, science, and foreign language courses
Develop and implement programs for bachelors degrees in math, science, engineering, and critical foreign languages with concurrent teaching credentials and part-time masters in education programs for math, science, and critical foreign language teachers to enhance both content knowledge and teaching skills
Create partnerships between National Laboratories and local high-need high schools to establish centers of excellence in math and science education
Expand NSF graduate research fellowship and traineeship programs, require NSF to work with institutions of higher education to facilitate the development of professional science masters degree programs, and expand NSFs science, mathematics, engineering and technology talent program
Once the bill is introduced and the actual language is available, we will be back with more details. Update: We’ve been told that the bill will not go through a committee and will instead be placed directly on the Senate calendar so that the Leadership can act on it at any time.
Also, the Senators who are sponsoring the bill and putting it forward are: Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), Jeff Bingaman (D-NM), Pete Domenici (R-NM), Daniel Inouye (D-HI), Ted Stevens (R-AK), Ted Kennedy (D-MA), Mike Enzi (R-WY), Joseph Lieberman (I-CT), John Ensign (R-NV), Barbara Mikulski (D-MD), Lamar Alexander (R-TN), Bill Nelson (R-FL), and Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX).
The House Science and Technology Committee plans to meet tomorrow to mark up 4 bills, including the High Performance Computing R&D Act (H.R. 1068). The HPC R&D Act is very similar to previous efforts to amend the original High Performance Computing and Communications Act of 1991, the act that established what has become the Networking and Information Technology Research and Development program.
This version differs from the most recent attempt (H.R. 28, introduced in the 109th Congress) in that it doesn’t attempt to authorize specific agency activities. But otherwise, it contains the two provisions we particularly liked about the previous version. First, it directs the Director of the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy to develop and maintain a research, development, and deployment roadmap for the provision of federal high-performance computing systems. Second, there’s an explicit requirement that the President’s advisory committee for IT (now a responsibility of the PCAST) review not only the goals of the NITRD program but the funding levels as well and report the results of that review to Congress every two years.
In previous Congresses, the various HPC acts have failed to become law for a variety of reasons. It seems the situation this year is slightly more hopeful — but we should have some better sense in a week or so, so stay tuned.
The markup will be webcast here beginning at 10 am ET. Should get quick approval by the committee.
If you’re interested in seeing what the bill would actually do to the HPCC, here’s an “as amended by” document. Red text is what’s added. Strikethrough is what’s taken away… Update: (March 12, 2007) — The House passed the measure by voice vote. Details here.
Frances E. Allen, a former CRA Board member, has received the 2006 A.M. Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the first time a woman has been given this honor. Allen, an IBM Fellow at the TJ Watson Research Center, was chosen for contributions that fundamentally improved the performance of computer programs in solving problems, and accelerated the use of high performance computing. Allen was also the first woman to be named an IBM Fellow in 1989. The Turing Award was first presented in 1966 and was named for British mathematician Alan M. Turing, is widely considered the “Nobel Prize in Computing.” It carries a $100,000 prize, with financial support provided by Intel Corporation.
From the ACM press release:
Allen made fundamental contributions to the theory and practice of program optimization, which translates the users’ problem-solving language statements into more efficient sequences of computer instructions. Her contributions also greatly extended earlier work in automatic program parallelization, which enables programs to use multiple processors simultaneously in order to obtain faster results. These techniques have made it possible to achieve high performance from computers while programming them in languages suitable to applications. They have contributed to advances in the use of high performance computers for solving problems such as weather forecasting, DNA matching, and national security functions.
“Fran Allen’s work has led to remarkable advances in compiler design and machine architecture that are at the foundation of modern high-performance computing,” said Ruzena Bajcsy, Chair of ACM’s Turing Award Committee, and professor of Electrical and Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley. “Her contributions have spanned most of the history of computer science, and have made possible computing techniques that we rely on today in business and technology. It is interesting to note Allen’s role in highly secret intelligence work on security codes for the organization now known as the National Security Agency, since it was Alan Turing, the namesake of this prestigious award, who devised techniques to help break the German codes during World War II,” said Bajcsy, who is Emeritus Director of the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS) at Berkeley.
The House Committee on Science and Technology held its first budget hearing of the year today with testimony from Dr. John Marburger, director of the Presidents Office of Science and Technology Policy. The focus of the chairman and several of the committee members, including perennial science champion Rep. Vern Ehlers (R-MI), was on Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) education and the decreases to NSFs Education and Human Resources Directorate in recent years, along with some concern regarding NASAs space exploration and aeronautics funding. The openingstatements as well as a web cast of the hearing are available online.
The Committee and Dr. Marburger for the Administration seemed to be in agreement that the increased funding for NSF, NIST, and DoE Office of Science were important and that the American Competitiveness Initiative is important for Americas future innovation and competitiveness. However, the Administration and the Chairman seemed to diverge when it comes to priorities. The Administration priority is research funding and Chairman Gordon said that the education recommendations of the Gathering Storm report should be an equal priority. The Chairman repeatedly came back to the fact that, while the FY08 budget request increases funding to NSFs EHR Directorate, that same Directorates funding has decreased by 50 percent in the last four years. He was also unimpressed with the Department of Education FY08 budget request in that he felt the STEM education funding should be at NSF.
You can see the entire hearing on the Committees web site.
The New York Times has a nicely-written obituary for computing pioneer Ken Kennedy, penned by John Markoff. Here’s a snippet:
A member of the generation of researchers who were the first to have access to modern supercomputers, Mr. Kennedy spearheaded early work on software programs known as parallelizing compilers, systems that can automatically spread workloads among a large number of processors, vastly speeding calculations.
Early computers were based on a single processor that would perform the steps of a software program sequentially. But in the 1970s and 1980s researchers began to look for ways to increase computing speed by harnessing tens, hundreds and even thousands of processors, in much the fashion that adding lanes to a freeway will allow more traffic to flow.
The challenge that such systems presented was the need to create programming tools that would hide the interdependencies and complexity from the scientists and engineers who wanted to use the machines as problem-solving tools.
“These compilers made it possible for mere mortals to write advanced programs,” said Edward Lazowska, the Bill and Melinda Gates professor of computer science at the University of Washington in Seattle. “Ken was the No. 1 person in parallel compiling.” (Parallel compilers are software programs that translate programmers language-oriented instructions into numeric codes that control computer operation.)
The software technology he developed has served as the foundation for successive generations of scientists and engineers who developed advanced simulations, including weather and climate prediction and the model of automobile collisions. Moreover, the fruits of his technology are now rapidly reaching broad consumer audiences both through the latest generations of personal computers and through videogame players, which now come equipped with parallel processors.
Kennedy also played an important role on the first incarnation of the President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC), which put together the 1999 Information Technology Research: Investing in our Future report. The strong, well-supported recommendations in that report helped pave the way for a dramatic expansion of the federal government’s support for computer science research. Kennedy was also a co-PI on CRA’s Computing Community Consortium proposal, which was ultimately successful.
I was privileged to have a few interactions with Kennedy over the six years or so I’ve been at CRA and was always impressed with his grasp of policy and his willingness to do more than was necessary in service of the field. Update: Chuck Koelbel from Rice passed along these additional details:
A memorial service for Dr. Kennedy will take place at First Presbyterian Church, 5300 Main Street, Houston, on Thursday, February 15 at 3pm. In lieu of flowers, the family suggest gifts be made to Rice University, Ken Kennedy Memorial Fund. Checks may be mailed to Rice University MS-81, P.O. Box 1892, Houston, TX, 77251-1892. To contribute online, visit giving.rice.edu, click “Make a Gift Online”, choose “Designation-Other, and type “Ken Kennedy Memorial Fund” in the Special Instruction box.
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:
National Science Foundation (in millions of dollars)
FY06 Actual
FY07 Budget Request
FY08 Request
$ Change vs FY07 Request
% Change vs FY07 Request (%)
Research and Related Activities
$4,449.25
$4,765.95
$5,131.69
$365.74
7.7%
Education and Human Resources
$700.26
$716.22
$750.60
$34.48
4.8%
MREFC
$233.81
$240.45
$244.74
$4.29
1.8%
Agency Operations and Award Management
$247.06
$281.82
$285.59
$3.77
1.3%
National Science Board
$3.94
$3.91
$4.03
$0.12
3.1%
Office of the Inspector General
$11.47
$11.86
$12.35
$0.49
4.1%
Total NSF
$5,645.79
$6,020.21
$6,429.00
$408.79
6.8%
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:
NSF Research and Related Activities Directorate Budgets (in millions of dollars)
FY06 Actual
FY07 Budget Request
FY08 Request
$ Change vs FY07 Request
% Change vs FY07 Request (%)
Biological Sciences
$580.90
$607.85
$633.00
$25.15
4.1%
Computer and Information Science and Engineering
$496.35
$526.69
$574.00
$47.31
9.0%
Engineering
$585.46
$628.55
$683.30
$54.75
8.7%
Geosciences
$703.95
$744.85
$792.00
$47.15
6.3%
Mathematical and Physical Sciences
$1,086.61
$1,150.30
$1,253.00
$102.70
8.9%
Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences
$201.23
$213.76
$222.00
$8.24
3.9%
Office of Cyberinfrastructure
$127.14
$182.42
$200.00
$17.58
9.6%
Office of International Science and Engineering
$42.61
$40.61
$45.00
$4.39
10.8%
Office of Polar Programs
$390.54
$438.10
$464.90
$26.80
6.1%
Integrative Activities1
$233.30
$231.37
$263.00
$31.63
13.7%
U.S. Arctic Research Commission
$1.17
$1.45
$1.49
$0.04
2.8%
Total, Research and Related Activities
$4,449.25
$4,765.95
$5,131.69
$365.74
7.7%
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:
NSF CISE Directorate Funding (in millions of dollars)
FY06 Actual
FY07 Budget Request
FY08 Request
$ Change vs FY07 Request
% Change vs FY07 Request (%)
Computing and Communication Foundation
$105.30
$122.82
$149.15
$26.33
21.4%
Computer and Network Systems
$141.07
$162.98
$191.98
$29.00
17.8%
Information and Intelligent Systems
$103.78
$119.30
$154.63
$35.33
29.6%
Information Technology Research
$146.20
$121.59
$78.24
-$43.35
-35.7%
Total, CISE
$496.35
$526.69
$574.00
$47.31
9.0%
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.
As stated in a previous post about the FY08 Budget Request, Department of Energys Office of Science did well with a $296 million, or 7 percent, increase over the FY07 request. The Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR) request is $340.2 million, an increase of $21.5 million or 6.8 percent.
The ASCR has three overarching programs: Research in applied mathematics and computer science with a request of $82.8 million up from $69.6 million in the FY07 request; Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing (SciDAC) with a request of $56.3 million up from $56.1 million in the FY07 request; and High-performance computing and network facilities and testbeds with a request of $201.1 million up from $193 million in the FY07 request.
Overall these are good numbers for computing, and science, and certainly help to make up for some of the recent lean years. As always, well keep you posted as we learn more and as the budget process goes forward on Capitol Hill.
President Bush released his FY 2008 budget request today and it appears that, as promised, the Administration remains committed to the American Competitiveness Initiative and the doubling trajectory for three key science agencies begun in last year’s budget request. We’ve only just started digging into the budget documents — and we’ll be getting more in-depth agency briefings later this afternoon — but here are some of the top-level numbers: [Just a note, comparing some of these numbers to FY 2007 is a bit problematic because the final FY 2007 estimates aren’t in yet. So in all cases but Defense and Homeland Security, the comparison is to the President’s requested funding level for FY 2007, which, in most cases, is probably actually higher than the final FY 2007 level set by the CR is likely to be. Therefore, the increases shown for these agencies’ requests may actually be greater compared to the final FY 2007 numbers.] National Science Foundation: Overall funding would rise to $6.429 billion in FY 2008, an increase of $409 million or 7 percent greater than the President’s FY 2007 budget request. NSF’s research accounts would grow $648 million over the FY 2007 request to $4.880 billion, an increase of 15 percent. National Institute of Standards and Technology: (Intramural Research and Facilities) NIST’s core research and facilities accounts would grow to $586 million in FY 2008, an increase of $55 million or 10 percent over the President’s FY 2007 request. Department of Energy, Office of Science: Increase to $4.398 billion, or $296 million or 7 percent greater than the President’s FY 2007 request. Defense: Defense is trickier to figure out because it and Homeland Security are the only two agencies with enacted levels for FY 2007. In the President’s FY 2008 request, Defense basic and applied research would decline $1.110 billion vs. the FY 2007 enacted level to $5.785 billion, a 16 percent reduction. For Basic research (6.1), the Administration requests $1.428 billion, a reduction of $137 million from the FY 07 enacted level (9 percent) and just $7 million more than the President requested in FY 07. Applied research would fall to $4.357 billion under the President’s plan, $973 million (18 percent) lower than FY 07 enacted, and $121 million less than he requested in FY 07. National Institutes of Health: The Administration plan would set NIH’s budget at $28.700 billion in FY 2008, $432 million more than the President’s FY 2007 request, but about $188 million short of the amount likely to be enacted in the FY 2007 CR. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration: NOAA would see its research budget rise to $358 million in FY 2008 under the President’s plan, an increase of $20 million or 6 percent compared to his FY 2007 request. We have to do a bit more digging to see how this will compare with the CR level. National Aeronautics and Space Administration: NASA’s Science account would grow to $5.516 billion in FY 2008, $186 million or 3 percent greater than the President’s FY 2007 request. Networking and Information Technology R&D Program: This is the cross-agency budget line for the NITRD program, one of just three interagency R&D efforts listed in the budget (the other two are the National Nanotechnology Initiative and the Climate Change Science Program). I’m hesitant to just put up the raw numbers here, because they always require some interpretation (see last year, for example), but the bottom line number is that the NITRD program would stay essentially flat at $3.057 billion in FY 2008, a $12 million increase over the President’s FY 2007 request (and the FY 2007 Defense enacted number). Slated for increases would be NSF’s NITRD activities, which would grow $90 million to $994 million, a 10 percent increase, and the Department of Energy and NASA, which would both increase by 4 percent. Defense IT R&D would suffer a 2 percent cut vs. the FY 2007 enacted level, and NIH would see a 14 percent decrease vs. the President’s FY 07 request. But it’s going to take a bit more investigating to figure out where NITRD really stands vs. FY 2007.
Just for comparison’s sake, the NNI would grow by 4 percent in FY 08 (to $1.447 billion) and the Climate Change Science Program would decline 7 percent to $1.544 billion.
We expect to have a lot more detail after the agency briefings this afternoon. We’ll post whatever we learn as soon as we can.
By the way, all the budget documents are perusable here.
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Lazowska Named Chair of Computing Community Consortium
/In: Computing Community Consortium (CCC), CRA, People /by Peter HarshaThe Computing Research Association is pleased to announce the appointment of Dr. Edward Lazowska, Bill & Melinda Gates Chair in Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington, as the inaugural Chair of the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council. This appointment was made after extensive consultations with computing research leaders, the Interim CCC Council and the National Science Foundation.
“CRA is delighted that our colleague, Ed Lazowska, has accepted this important role” said Daniel A. Reed, Chair of the CRA Board and Director of the Renaissance Computing Institute at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
Dr. Lazowska has a distinguished career in computing research, public service, and service to the computing research community, including time spent as co-chair of the President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee and the Defense Advanced Projects Agency Information Science and Technology study group. Dr. Lazowska is a Member of the National Academy of Engineering, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, the Association for Computing Machinery, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
In his new role, Dr. Lazowska will lead the CCC — a consortium of experts drawn from and chosen by the computing research community — as it seeks to stimulate scientific leadership and vision on issues related to computing research and future large-scale computing research projects. The CCC, established by CRA in partnership with NSF, will catalyze the computing research community to debate long-range research challenges, to build consensus around research visions, to articulate those visions, and to develop the most promising visions into clearly defined initiatives. The next step in its implementation is populating the CCC Council, which will facilitate the processes by which the consortium will do its work.
About CRA. The CRA was established 30 years ago and has members at more than 250 research entities in academia, industry and government. Its mission is to strengthen research and advance education in the computing fields, expand opportunities for women and minorities, and improve public and policymaker understanding of the importance of computing and computing research in society.
For more on the CCC: http://www.cra.org/ccc
Previous posts on the CCC.
Bill Gates Testifies on Competitiveness Issues
/In: American Competitiveness Initiative, Funding, Policy, Research /by MelissaNorrBill Gates, chairman of Microsoft Corp, testified before the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee on competitiveness issues this morning. A web cast of the hearing is available here. He emphasized three areas: educating students and workers, immigration, and federal funding of basic research and R&D tax credit. His extensive written testimony (where he cites CRAs own Jay Vegso!) goes into great detail on each of these three issues.
Gates hit the competitiveness high notes that are found in the Rising Above the Gathering Storm and Tapping Americas Potential reports including recruiting more high school science and math teachers, doubling the number of math, science, and engineering graduates, increasing basic science R&D at the major research agencies by 10% over the next 7 years, and increasing visas for high skilled workers. He used computing as an example in both his oral and written testimony. His written testimony states:
To combat this decline, Gates takes a recommendation straight from the Gathering Storm report and calls for 25,000 4-year undergraduate scholarships in the STEM fields. He also said that the opportunities for innovation in computing are greater than most people, especially students, realize.
New Competitiveness Legislation
/In: American Competitiveness Initiative, Policy /by MelissaNorrThe America COMPETES (Creating Opportunities to Meaningfully Promote Excellence in Technology, Education, and Science) Act will be introduced in the US Senate on Monday. The bill is a compilation of provisions and language from past innovation legislation like the National Competitiveness Investment Act, American Innovation and Competitiveness Act of 2006, and Protecting Americas Competitive Edge Through Energy Act of 2006. We don’t yet have a draft of the actual bill language, but a summary of the bill states: the America COMPETES Act focuses on three primary areas of importance to maintaining and improving United States innovation in the 21st Century: (1) increasing research investment, (2) strengthening educational opportunities in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics from elementary through graduate school, and (3) developing an innovation infrastructure.
Provisions in the bill include:
Once the bill is introduced and the actual language is available, we will be back with more details.
Update: We’ve been told that the bill will not go through a committee and will instead be placed directly on the Senate calendar so that the Leadership can act on it at any time.
Also, the Senators who are sponsoring the bill and putting it forward are: Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), Jeff Bingaman (D-NM), Pete Domenici (R-NM), Daniel Inouye (D-HI), Ted Stevens (R-AK), Ted Kennedy (D-MA), Mike Enzi (R-WY), Joseph Lieberman (I-CT), John Ensign (R-NV), Barbara Mikulski (D-MD), Lamar Alexander (R-TN), Bill Nelson (R-FL), and Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX).
House Science to Mark Up HPC R&D Legislation
/In: Policy /by Peter HarshaThe House Science and Technology Committee plans to meet tomorrow to mark up 4 bills, including the High Performance Computing R&D Act (H.R. 1068). The HPC R&D Act is very similar to previous efforts to amend the original High Performance Computing and Communications Act of 1991, the act that established what has become the Networking and Information Technology Research and Development program.
This version differs from the most recent attempt (H.R. 28, introduced in the 109th Congress) in that it doesn’t attempt to authorize specific agency activities. But otherwise, it contains the two provisions we particularly liked about the previous version. First, it directs the Director of the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy to develop and maintain a research, development, and deployment roadmap for the provision of federal high-performance computing systems. Second, there’s an explicit requirement that the President’s advisory committee for IT (now a responsibility of the PCAST) review not only the goals of the NITRD program but the funding levels as well and report the results of that review to Congress every two years.
In previous Congresses, the various HPC acts have failed to become law for a variety of reasons. It seems the situation this year is slightly more hopeful — but we should have some better sense in a week or so, so stay tuned.
The markup will be webcast here beginning at 10 am ET. Should get quick approval by the committee.
If you’re interested in seeing what the bill would actually do to the HPCC, here’s an “as amended by” document. Red text is what’s added. Strikethrough is what’s taken away…
Update: (March 12, 2007) — The House passed the measure by voice vote. Details here.
Frances Allen Receives Turing Award
/In: People /by MelissaNorrFrances E. Allen, a former CRA Board member, has received the 2006 A.M. Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the first time a woman has been given this honor. Allen, an IBM Fellow at the TJ Watson Research Center, was chosen for contributions that fundamentally improved the performance of computer programs in solving problems, and accelerated the use of high performance computing. Allen was also the first woman to be named an IBM Fellow in 1989. The Turing Award was first presented in 1966 and was named for British mathematician Alan M. Turing, is widely considered the “Nobel Prize in Computing.” It carries a $100,000 prize, with financial support provided by Intel Corporation.
From the ACM press release:
House Science Committee Budget Hearing
/In: American Competitiveness Initiative, Funding, FY08 Appropriations /by MelissaNorrThe House Committee on Science and Technology held its first budget hearing of the year today with testimony from Dr. John Marburger, director of the Presidents Office of Science and Technology Policy. The focus of the chairman and several of the committee members, including perennial science champion Rep. Vern Ehlers (R-MI), was on Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) education and the decreases to NSFs Education and Human Resources Directorate in recent years, along with some concern regarding NASAs space exploration and aeronautics funding. The opening statements as well as a web cast of the hearing are available online.
The Committee and Dr. Marburger for the Administration seemed to be in agreement that the increased funding for NSF, NIST, and DoE Office of Science were important and that the American Competitiveness Initiative is important for Americas future innovation and competitiveness. However, the Administration and the Chairman seemed to diverge when it comes to priorities. The Administration priority is research funding and Chairman Gordon said that the education recommendations of the Gathering Storm report should be an equal priority. The Chairman repeatedly came back to the fact that, while the FY08 budget request increases funding to NSFs EHR Directorate, that same Directorates funding has decreased by 50 percent in the last four years. He was also unimpressed with the Department of Education FY08 budget request in that he felt the STEM education funding should be at NSF.
You can see the entire hearing on the Committees web site.
Ken Kennedy
/In: People, R&D in the Press /by Peter HarshaThe New York Times has a nicely-written obituary for computing pioneer Ken Kennedy, penned by John Markoff. Here’s a snippet:
Kennedy also played an important role on the first incarnation of the President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC), which put together the 1999 Information Technology Research: Investing in our Future report. The strong, well-supported recommendations in that report helped pave the way for a dramatic expansion of the federal government’s support for computer science research. Kennedy was also a co-PI on CRA’s Computing Community Consortium proposal, which was ultimately successful.
I was privileged to have a few interactions with Kennedy over the six years or so I’ve been at CRA and was always impressed with his grasp of policy and his willingness to do more than was necessary in service of the field.
Update: Chuck Koelbel from Rice passed along these additional details:
FY08 Budget Detail: National Science Foundation
/In: American Competitiveness Initiative, Funding, FY08 Appropriations /by Peter HarshaAs 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:
(in millions of dollars)
Actual
Budget Request
Request
FY07 Request
FY07 Request (%)
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:
Directorate Budgets
(in millions of dollars)
Actual
Budget Request
Request
FY07 Request
FY07 Request (%)
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:
(in millions of dollars)
Actual
Budget Request
Request
FY07 Request
FY07 Request (%)
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:
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.
FY08 Budget Detail: DOE’s Office of Science
/In: American Competitiveness Initiative, Funding, FY08 Appropriations /by MelissaNorrAs stated in a previous post about the FY08 Budget Request, Department of Energys Office of Science did well with a $296 million, or 7 percent, increase over the FY07 request. The Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR) request is $340.2 million, an increase of $21.5 million or 6.8 percent.
The ASCR has three overarching programs: Research in applied mathematics and computer science with a request of $82.8 million up from $69.6 million in the FY07 request; Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing (SciDAC) with a request of $56.3 million up from $56.1 million in the FY07 request; and High-performance computing and network facilities and testbeds with a request of $201.1 million up from $193 million in the FY07 request.
Overall these are good numbers for computing, and science, and certainly help to make up for some of the recent lean years. As always, well keep you posted as we learn more and as the budget process goes forward on Capitol Hill.
President Releases FY 2008 Budget; Stays Committed to ACI
/In: American Competitiveness Initiative, Funding, FY08 Appropriations /by Peter HarshaPresident Bush released his FY 2008 budget request today and it appears that, as promised, the Administration remains committed to the American Competitiveness Initiative and the doubling trajectory for three key science agencies begun in last year’s budget request. We’ve only just started digging into the budget documents — and we’ll be getting more in-depth agency briefings later this afternoon — but here are some of the top-level numbers: [Just a note, comparing some of these numbers to FY 2007 is a bit problematic because the final FY 2007 estimates aren’t in yet. So in all cases but Defense and Homeland Security, the comparison is to the President’s requested funding level for FY 2007, which, in most cases, is probably actually higher than the final FY 2007 level set by the CR is likely to be. Therefore, the increases shown for these agencies’ requests may actually be greater compared to the final FY 2007 numbers.]
National Science Foundation: Overall funding would rise to $6.429 billion in FY 2008, an increase of $409 million or 7 percent greater than the President’s FY 2007 budget request. NSF’s research accounts would grow $648 million over the FY 2007 request to $4.880 billion, an increase of 15 percent.
National Institute of Standards and Technology: (Intramural Research and Facilities) NIST’s core research and facilities accounts would grow to $586 million in FY 2008, an increase of $55 million or 10 percent over the President’s FY 2007 request.
Department of Energy, Office of Science: Increase to $4.398 billion, or $296 million or 7 percent greater than the President’s FY 2007 request.
Defense: Defense is trickier to figure out because it and Homeland Security are the only two agencies with enacted levels for FY 2007. In the President’s FY 2008 request, Defense basic and applied research would decline $1.110 billion vs. the FY 2007 enacted level to $5.785 billion, a 16 percent reduction. For Basic research (6.1), the Administration requests $1.428 billion, a reduction of $137 million from the FY 07 enacted level (9 percent) and just $7 million more than the President requested in FY 07. Applied research would fall to $4.357 billion under the President’s plan, $973 million (18 percent) lower than FY 07 enacted, and $121 million less than he requested in FY 07.
National Institutes of Health: The Administration plan would set NIH’s budget at $28.700 billion in FY 2008, $432 million more than the President’s FY 2007 request, but about $188 million short of the amount likely to be enacted in the FY 2007 CR.
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration: NOAA would see its research budget rise to $358 million in FY 2008 under the President’s plan, an increase of $20 million or 6 percent compared to his FY 2007 request. We have to do a bit more digging to see how this will compare with the CR level.
National Aeronautics and Space Administration: NASA’s Science account would grow to $5.516 billion in FY 2008, $186 million or 3 percent greater than the President’s FY 2007 request.
Networking and Information Technology R&D Program: This is the cross-agency budget line for the NITRD program, one of just three interagency R&D efforts listed in the budget (the other two are the National Nanotechnology Initiative and the Climate Change Science Program). I’m hesitant to just put up the raw numbers here, because they always require some interpretation (see last year, for example), but the bottom line number is that the NITRD program would stay essentially flat at $3.057 billion in FY 2008, a $12 million increase over the President’s FY 2007 request (and the FY 2007 Defense enacted number). Slated for increases would be NSF’s NITRD activities, which would grow $90 million to $994 million, a 10 percent increase, and the Department of Energy and NASA, which would both increase by 4 percent. Defense IT R&D would suffer a 2 percent cut vs. the FY 2007 enacted level, and NIH would see a 14 percent decrease vs. the President’s FY 07 request. But it’s going to take a bit more investigating to figure out where NITRD really stands vs. FY 2007.
Just for comparison’s sake, the NNI would grow by 4 percent in FY 08 (to $1.447 billion) and the Climate Change Science Program would decline 7 percent to $1.544 billion.
We expect to have a lot more detail after the agency briefings this afternoon. We’ll post whatever we learn as soon as we can.
By the way, all the budget documents are perusable here.