The Presidential IT Advisory Committee (PITAC) has submitted its report to the President titled Cyber Security: A Crisis in Prioritization in which the committee emphasizes vulnerabilities to the nation’s critical IT infrastructure. Among the committee’s numerous recommendations are that the federal government

Increase Federal support for fundamental research in civilian cyber security by $90 million annually at NSF and by substantial amounts at agencies such as DARPA and DHS to support work in 10 high-priority areas identified by PITAC.

With the current administration’s track record on national security spending, it will be interesting to see the President’s response to these funding recommendations.

A copy of the report can be found here: http://www.nitrd.gov/pitac/reports/20050301_cybersecurity/cybersecurity.pdf

InformationWeek’s Aaron Ricadela looks at the “seismic shift” occurring in the world of high-end computing, pointing to the retirement of the PACI program and the National Science Foundation’s new focus on “shared cyberinfrastructure.” The article examines the unique roles each HPC center will play, with San Diego focusing on data, NCSA focusing on innovative systems, and Pittsburgh supplying cycles.

In a sidebar interview, Ricadela talks to Peter Freeman, leader of NSF’s Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate. Freeman describes the shift taking place at NSF and how shared cyberinfrastructure will benefit users. “When people talk about PACI, they’re talking about the way high–performance computing used to be provided to the research community, versus the way we think it will be provided five to 10 years down the road,” Freeman explains. “We’re right in the middle of that kind of transformation.”

A second sidebar looks at NCSA’s plans for the future under new director Thom Dunning, including the development of “cyberenvironments” and workflow tools to assist researchers, an expansion of the center’s Private Sector Program, and the launch of the Innovative Systems Lab to push the computing envelope.

A federal report, created by the High-End Computing Revitalization Task Force (HECRTF), was released recently (May 2004) and offers some compelling insight into the government’s position and direction on high performance computing in the United States. This task force was formed by the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), which was established by congress nearly 30 years ago to advise the President and others in the Executive Office about the impact of science and technology on US domestic and international affairs.

The report, appropriately titled “Federal Plan for High-End Computing”, calls for (among other things) significant increases in government funding (compared to that of ‘04) for systems engineering and prototypes as well as for software evaluation and testing, but minimal increases in funding for similar areas of hardware.

A copy of the report can be found here: http://www.itrd.gov/pubs/2004_hecrtf/20040702_hecrtf.pdf

With the NSF website redesign, comes a page a new page…or at least unearths a page that was more hidden before. The science and engineering statistics site includes publications, data, and analysis. Trends in academic R&D spending and quantitative data on public perceptions of science and technology, for example.

Some of it’s long in the tooth, but some of it looks like a promising source for dropping a stat or sound bite from the horse’s mouth into your next proposal or presentation.