More on cyberinfrastructure funding
As a partial acknowledgment of and natural extension to the recent academic recommendations for more multidisciplinary collaboration in higher education research, John Marburger recently submitted a memo to the Heads of Executive Departments and Agencies calling for greater unification of funding efforts to address project duplication among other things. From the optimists perspective, the Office of Science and Technology also wants to place greater emphasis on high performance computing efforts. Quoting from the memo, Marburger says
While the importance of each of the Networking and Information Technology R&D (NITRD) program areas continues, investments in high-end computing and cyber infrastructure R&D should be given higher relative priority due to their potential for broad impact.
The memo goes on to state
Advanced networking research (including test-beds) on hardware and software for secure, reliable, distributed computing environments and tools that provide the communication, analysis and sharing of very large amounts of information will accelerate discovery and enable new technological advances.
This is certainly a step in the right direction for making high-end computing a more salient issue on the federal research agenda. Thanks to Government Computing News for their coverage of the memo.
