| Highlights - Funding for
the Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) program
would increase 6.2 percent in the President’s FY 2009 budget request (see Table
I-9). - The National Science Foundation (NSF), the primary
supporter of university-led computer science research in the United States, would
see its share of the NITRD program increase $158.8 million or 17 percent to $1.1
billion in FY 2009 under the President’s plan. - In July 2007, the President’s Council of Advisors
for Science and Technology (PCAST) released the first full review of the priorities
and goals of the NITRD program in eight years. Its recommendations will likely
form the basis for new NITRD authorizing legislation in 2008. Introduction and Background The importance of computing research in enabling the
new economy is well documented. The resulting advances in information technology
have led to significant improvements in product design, development and distribution
for American industry, provided instant communications for people worldwide, and
enabled new scientific disciplines like bioinformatics and nanotechnology that
show great promise in improving a whole range of health, security, and communications
technologies. Former Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan has said that
the growing use of information technology has been the distinguishing feature
of this “pivotal period in American economic history.” Recent analysis suggests
that the remarkable growth the U.S. experienced between 1995 and
2002 was spurred by an increase in productivity enabled almost completely by factors
related to IT. A report by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation
released in March 2007 noted: “In the new global economy information and communications
technology (IT) is the major driver, not just of improved quality of life, but
also of economic growth… In fact, in the United States IT was responsible for
two-thirds of total factor growth in productivity between 1995 and 2002 and virtually
all of the growth in labor productivity.” Information
technology has also changed the conduct of research. Innovations in computing
and networking technologies are enabling scientific discovery across every scientific
discipline—from mapping the human brain to modeling climatic change. Researchers,
faced with research problems that are ever more complex and interdisciplinary
in nature, are using IT to collaborate across the globe, simulate experiments,
visualize large and complex datasets, and collect and manage massive amounts of
data. According to a 1995 report by the National Research
Council, a significant reason for this dramatic advance in computing technology
and the subsequent increase in innovation and productivity is the “extraordinarily
productive interplay of federally funded university research, federally and privately
funded industrial research, and entrepreneurial companies founded and staffed
by people who moved back and forth between universities and industry.” That report,
and a subsequent 1999 report by the President’s Information Technology Advisory
Committee (PITAC), emphasized the “spectacular” return on the federal investment
in long-term IT research and development. However, in that 1999 report PITAC—a congressionally-chartered,
presidentially-appointed committee charged with assessing the overall federal
investment in IT R&D—also determined that federal support for IT R&D
was inadequate and too focused on near-term problems; long-term fundamental IT
research was not sufficiently supported relative to the importance of IT to the
United States’ economic, health, scientific and other aspirations; critical problems
in computing were going unsolved; and the rate of introduction of new ideas was
dangerously low. The PITAC report included a series of recommendations, including
a set of research priorities and an affirmation of the committee’s unanimous opinion
that the federal government has an “essential” role in supporting long-term, high-risk
IT R&D. This opinion was buttressed by the inclusion of a recommendation for
specific increases in funding levels for federal IT R&D programs beginning
in FY 2000 and continuing through FY 2004—an increase of $1.3 billion in
additional funding over those five years. Though the funding levels actually appropriated to
federal IT R&D programs never approached the level of the PITAC recommendations—federal
agencies received $2.2 billion in FY 2004 for IT R&D, $476 million short of
the final PITAC recommendation—the PITAC report has done much to shape
the current federal IT R&D effort. As of FY 2008, that effort is now a $3.3
billion, multi-agency enterprise called the Networking and Information Technology
Research and Development (NITRD) program and coordinated by the Interagency Working
Group (IWG) on Information Technology Research and Development of the National
Science and Technology Council (NSTC). NITRD is the successor of the High Performance
Computing and Communications Program established by Congress in 1991. NITRD agencies
now coordinate research in eight Program Component Areas (PCAs).
The National Science Foundation (NSF) is the lead agency in NITRD. Current Policy Environment Over the last twelve months there have been two significant
developments in federal computing research policy. The first was the passage of
the High Performance Computing Research and Development Act (H.R. 1068), which
was ultimately incorporated into the America COMPETES Act that became law in August,
2007 (P.L. 110-69). The bill amended the High Performance Computing and Communications
Act of 1991—the bill that established what would ultimately become the NITRD program—to
attempt to provide sustained, transparent access for the research community to
federal high performance computing assets, assure a balanced research portfolio
and beef up interagency planning. The bill had appeared in various forms in the 106th
through 109th Congresses, but had never gained the full approval of the Congress—
almost always for reasons unrelated to the content of the bill itself. However,
despite some concern about jurisdictional “friction” in the Senate that could
have derailed the bill’s inclusion in the COMPETES Act, Senate and House conferees
ultimately agreed to allow the House version of the bill into COMPETES with only
one addition: an extra section that authorizes efforts in “Advanced Information
and Communications Technology Research” at NSF.[3] Otherwise,
the HPC R&D Act remained essentially unchanged in its final version. In addition to striking provisions of the old HPCC
Act of 1991 that were no longer relevant to the NITRD program (because they referred
to programs that had already ended or technologies that had already been superseded),
the new Act contains two provisions requested by many in the computing research
community. The first requires the White House Office of Science and Technology
Policy (OSTP) to develop and maintain a research, development and deployment roadmap
for the provision of federal high-performance computing systems. The second provides
an explicit requirement that the President’s advisory committee for information
technology (a role now filled by the President’s Council of Advisors for Science
and Technology (PCAST)), review not only the goals of NITRD, but the funding levels
as well and report the results of that review to Congress every two years. The reason for this second request had to do with some
frustration within the computing research community over the absence of such a
comprehensive review of the NITRD program since the 1999 PITAC report Investing in Our Future. In the intervening
eight years, the PITAC had reviewed portions of the NITRD program—primarily specific
research areas like cyber security, computational science and health and information
technology—but never examined the full scope of the research program and never
examined whether the current cross-agency coordination mechanisms were adequate
to achieve the program’s goals. However, at about the same time as the HPC R&D
Act was enacted as part of the COMPETES Act, PCAST, which had been charged with
taking over the PITAC’s responsibility for reviewing the NITRD program, released
a report that was almost completely responsive to the new reporting requirement
in the HPC R&D Act.[4] That
report, released in early September 2007 and called Leadership Under Challenge: Information Technology R&D in a Competitive
World, marked the second significant computing research policy development
in 2007. The report makes a strong case that America’s current global success relies
in large part on our lead in information technologies, but that our favorable
position in developing and adopting new networking and information technologies
is far from assured. Other nations have recognized the value of leadership in
IT and are mounting challenges, the report notes. Our current success rests on
our leadership throughout the IT ecosystem—in the market positions of US IT firms,
our IT commercialization systems and in the position of U.S. higher education and research
systems. The committee concluded that the enabling foundation for that ecosystem
was clear: early and continuing federal investments in IT R&D. Included with
these findings are 35 recommendations for a range of players in the IT ecosystem,
including federal agencies, the NITRD National Coordinating Office (NCO), OSTP,
and the university and industrial research communities. Stated simply, the recommendations
fit under four overarching themes: 1) Address the demand for skilled IT professionals
by revamping curricula, increasing fellowships, and simplifying visa processes;
2) Emphasize larger-scale, longer-term, multidisciplinary IT R&D and innovative,
higher-risk research; 3) Give priority to R&D in IT systems connected with
the physical world, software, digital data and networking; and 4) Develop and implement strategic and technical
plans for the NITRD program. It is that last overarching recommendation that is
likely to form the basis of some legislative activity in the coming months. The
PCAST report contains a number of specific recommendations for plans and studies
to be drawn up and conducted by both the NCO and OSTP. Ensuring those recommendations
get acted upon likely will be the focus of legislation under consideration by
the House Science and Technology Committee (which has jurisdiction over both OSTP
and the NITRD NCO). Though the committee anticipates introducing a bill by summer
2008, staff for Committee Chairman Bart Gordon (D-TN) predict they will not be
able to move the bill much further than the committee by the end of the session.
However, Chairman Gordon hopes that work this year will leave the committee well-positioned
to act on the bill in the 111th Congress. Budget Request Eight agencies included requests for FY 2009 funding
as part of the NITRD activity. Under the President’s plan, NSF would once again
be designated as the lead agency for the initiative. For FY 2009, the President
has requested $3.5 billion for the NITRD initiative, an increase of 6.2 percent
over FY 2008 (see Table I-9). The main growth in the
NITRD budget would occur in the three agencies that are the focus of the President’s
American Competitiveness Initiative.
NSF, DOE and NIST’s IT R&D budgets would see increases of 17.0 percent, 13.4
percent, and 8.1 percent, respectively compared to their FY 2008 budgets. The
remainder of the participating agencies would see flat or declining budgets under
the President’s plan. National Science
Foundation: The National Science Foundation is the only federal science agency with
the mandate to support the broad range of sciences—a commitment that also extends
to NSF’s participation in NITRD, where it serves as the “lead agency” for the
program and the only one supporting research in each of the eight NITRD PCAs.
Under the President’s plan, the agency would spend $1.1 billion on NITRD-related
research in FY 2009, an increase of $159 million, or 17 percent. The locus of NSF’s NITRD activity is the foundation’s
Computing and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) directorate, which would
account for $639 million of NSF’s NITRD-related R&D in FY 2009, an increase
of $104 million (or 19.5 percent) over the FY 2008 enacted level. CISE would continue
to be the lead directorate for the Foundation-wide “Cyber-enabled Discovery and
Innovation” initiative, which would more than double to $100 million in FY 2009—including
$33 million in CISE—compared to $48 million overall in FY 2008. Additionally,
the Foundation requests two new Foundation-wide initiatives that have computing-related
foci. The first is a $20 million investment in “Science and Engineering Beyond
Moore’s Law,” which aims to “position the U.S. at the forefront of communications
and computation capability beyond the physical and conceptional limitations of
current systems.” That program would be led by the Mathematics and Physical Sciences
directorate, but CISE would control $6 million in awards. The second is a $15
million investment ($3.5 million in CISE) in “Adaptive Systems Technology” that
focuses on “generating pathways and interfaces between human and physical systems
that will revolutionize the development of novel adaptive systems.” Additionally, within CISE, the request includes $78
million for a new Computing Fundamentals focus. This funding would be set aside
for basic, potentially transformative research answering fundamental questions
in computing that have the potential for “significant, enduring impact.” Foci
include cyber-physical systems, data-intensive computing, software for complex
systems, cybersecurity, network science and engineering and understanding “what
is computable?” when humans and machines work together to solve problems neither
can solve alone. NSF’s Office of Cyberinfrastructure (OCI) would also
see a significant increase in the President’s budget for FY 2009. Under the Administration’s
plan, the office would grow 18.8 percent over FY 2008 to $220 million. OCI supports
the development, acquisition and operation of “state-of-the-art cyberinfrastructure
resources,” which include everything from information technology resources and
tools such as supercomputers, high-capacity mass-storage systems, system software
suites and programming environments, to scalable interactive visualization tools,
productivity software libraries and tools, and large- scale data repositories
and information management systems. In FY 2009, the office plans to boost its
support for software and services for complex science, engineering, and cyber
services. In addition, OCI would spend an additional $27 million on sustaining
the operations of university supercomputing centers and to bridge them to the
TeraGrid or Extensible Terascale Facility. Department
of Defense (DOD): Overall funding for IT R&D
at DOD agencies would decrease by 1.0 percent to $1.2 billion in FY 2009, but
not all defense agencies would see a decrease. While the National Security Agency
(NSA) and the service labs would see decreases of 13 percent and 6 percent respectively,
the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) would see its budget climb
$39.5 million in FY 2009 to $570.2 million, an increase of 7.4 percent. The bulk of DARPA’s increase would go towards increased
investments in its High Performance Computing Systems program, increases to support
math and computer science institutes and partnerships and new efforts in large
scale networking. These increases are offset somewhat by requested decreases to
“selected information assurance projects” that are transitioning and a reduction
to DARPA’s participation in the Human-Computer Interaction PCA for programs that
have completed work on software tools for collaborative cognition programs. In February 2007, DARPA also reorganized the program
offices largely responsible for its IT R&D efforts. The Information Exploitation
Office (IXO), which focused on developing sensor and information systems technology
for use in the battlespace, has been merged with the Information Processing Technology
Office (IPTO)—which focused on inventing the networking, computing, and software
technologies vital to the DOD mission—to form a new office called the Information
Processing Techniques Office (IPTO). Some in the computing research community
have concerns that the move might drive DARPA’s IT R&D further toward a more
development-oriented approach and away from more fundamental research efforts
in IT, but staff in the new office have emphasized they plan to focus on both
technology (which tends to be research-focused) and systems (which tend to be
development-focused). The new office is headed by former IPTO Deputy Director
Dr. Chuck Morefield. Elsewhere in DOD, the service labs would see a reduction
of $34.8 million in FY 2009 to $548 million, though the NITRD NCO indicates this
is solely because of the elimination of “Congressional add-ons from 2008.” Otherwise,
under the President’s plan the labs would continue their efforts in high end computing,
cyber security, human-computer interaction, large scale networking, high confidence
software and systems and software design. NSA would see its IT R&D budget decline $17.8 million
to $119.3 million. The decrease is related to the completion of the development
of the El Dorado computing system and a decrease
in the amount of funding needed for the Integrated High End Computing program.
Health and
Human Services (HHS): NIH constitutes the bulk of funding in IT R&D at HHS. For FY 2009,
the President’s plan includes $555.5 million in IT R&D funding at HHS, a decrease
of 0.2 percent, or $1.1 million less than the FY 2008 level. Within HHS, NIH participates
in NITRD by supporting research that advances its mission of developing the basic
knowledge for the understanding, diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of human
disease. IT research in this area includes applying the power of computing to
manage and analyze biomedical data and to model biological processes. NIH would
receive $509.6 million in FY 2009. AHRQ focuses on research into state-of-the-art
IT for use in health care applications such as computer-based patient records,
clinical decision support systems, and standards for patient care data. AHRQ would
be funded at $44.8 million for IT R&D under the request. Department of Energy (DOE): IT R&D
activities in DOE’s Office of Science, NNSA, and, for the first time, the Office
of Nuclear Energy and the Office of Fossil Energy constitute DOE’s participation
in NITRD. The Office of Science focuses on computational and networking tools
that enable researchers to model, simulate, analyze, and predict complex physical,
chemical and biological phenomena important to the department’s overall mission.
NNSA supports research developing new means of assessing the performance, safety,
and reliability of nuclear weapons systems through high-fidelity computer models
and simulations. Under the President’s plan DOE NITRD funding would be $494 million
for FY 2009, an increase of 13.4 percent, or $58.6 million. The Office of Science’s Advanced
Scientific Computing Research (ASCR) program makes up the bulk of the department’s
participation in NITRD. For FY 2009, ASCR would grow to $368.8 million, up 5 percent
over FY 2008. ASCR’s mission is to underpin and enable the efforts of programs
within DOE SC, as well as “to provide the high-performance computational and networking
resources that are required for world leadership in science.” Included in the
ASCR budget request is $93.2 million for applied mathematics and computer science
research, $58.1 million for the Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing
program (SciDAC), and $217.5 million for high-performance computing and network
facilities and testbeds. NNSA would see an increase of $1.2 million in NITRD-related
funding to $29.5 million for FY 2009. National Aeronautics and
Space Administration (NASA): The President’s request includes
$70.7 million for NASA IT R&D in FY 2009, down from $72.3 million in FY 2008.
NASA ascribes this decrease to a change in accounting procedures and not to actual
cuts to IT R&D efforts. Within its NITRD-related efforts, NASA supports research
in Cyber Security and Information Assurance, Large Scale Networking, and High
Confidence Software and Systems, in order to focus on R&D aimed at implementing
its “Vision for Space Exploration.” Department of Commerce
(DOC): The DOC request for FY 2008 contains NITRD-related funding
requests from two agencies: NOAA and NIST. NIST IT R&D efforts include working
with industry, educational, and government organizations to make IT systems more
useable, secure, scalable, and interoperable. In addition, NIST works to apply
IT to specialized areas like biotechnology and manufacturing, and to encourage
industry to accelerate development of IT innovations. The President’s request
includes $67.0 million for NIST in FY 2009, an increase of $5 million over FY
2008. NOAA supports IT research in emerging computer technologies for improved
climate modeling and weather forecasting, and for improved communications technologies
to disseminate weather products and warnings to emergency responders, policymakers,
and the general public. The President’s request includes $23.3 million for NOAA
in FY 2009, an increase of $1 million. Environmental Protection
Agency (EPA): The EPA would receive $6 million in FY 2009 under the President’s
plan, the same as it received in FY 2008. EPA intends to use that funding to support
IT technologies that facilitate ecosystem modeling, risk assessment, and environmental
decision making at the federal, state, and local levels.
National Archives
and Records Administration (NARA): In 2006, the NSTC invited NARA to become a member of the
NITRD program in recognition of the research NARA sponsors on problems that
must be solved for effective lifecycle management of records in the context of
e-government. The research focuses on the management and preservation of electronic
records and fosters the development of advanced technologies for the management
of electronic records for the current and future operations needs of government.
For FY 2009, the agency requests $4.5 million, the same as it received in FY 2008.
Other
agencies include the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), National Security Agency (NSA), Department
of Defense Service Research Organizations, Department of Defense Office of the
Secretary of Defense (OSD), Department of Energy (DOE) National Nuclear Security
Administration (NNSA), DOE Office of Science, Environmental Protection Agency
(EPA), National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), National Institutes
of Health (NIH), National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), National Archives and Records Administration
(NARA), and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
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