The US Office of Science and Technology has released the PITAC (President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee) report that focuses on computational technology. This new report, aptly titled Computational Science: Ensuring America’s Competitiveness, calls for an overhaul of the existing models for computational collaboration and funding within industry, academia, and government.

Citing the lack of clear vision for computational science in the US and increased globalization in computational technology production, the report examines where the US is going with respect to computational capability. Mentioning complacency, lack of organization, and the lack of understanding of what computational science is all about, the committee

believes that the Nation’s failure to embrace computational science is symptomatic of a larger failure to recognize that many 21st-century research challenges are themselves profoundly multidisciplinary, requiring teams of highly skilled people from diverse areas of science, engineering, public policy, and the social sciences.

In addition, the report provides some disturbing statistics about the decline in intellectual resources. Among them,

The 849 doctoral degrees in computer science and computer engineering awarded in 2002 by U.S. institutions was the lowest number since 1989, according to an annual Computing Research Association survey [NRC,2005].

So what is the report asking government to do? In a nutshell, provide a stronger commitment, better long term support (aka funding), and better coordination (aka leadership) within the computational science ecosystem.

Today’s Computing Research Policy Blog contains an appropriations update for NSF, NASA, and NIST with lots of details and links. Because of the way the appropriations process is now configured, and the way the rules in the U.S. House are structured, apparently those agencies now compete for their funding against the interests of state and local law enforcment agencies. A valuable read for those who want to understand the conditions currently helping to determine our nation’s investment in science and engineering research.

In March of this year, the NSF Workshop on Cyberinfrastructure for the Social Sciences was held in Warrenton, VA. The purpose of the workshop was to engage the social science community (sociologists, psychologists, economists, etc. ) and unite them with the computer scientists and engineers to discuss and compose a future plan for Cyberinfrastructure that benefits both research communities in a collaborative way. Two goals were outlined for the workshop and the resulting report:

1. The Workshop Report should lay out a Cyberinfrastructure research, experimentation, and infrastructure path forward for the SBE and CISE community and provide a framework for projects and efforts in this area.

2. The Workshop should provide a venue for community building within the SBE and CISE communities, and in particular a venue for a multi-disciplinary synergistic community which leverages the perspectives and research of both SBE and CISE constituencies.

Both goals were achieved. Many recommendations and challenges resulted from the meeting, which are outlined in the full report (440 K, 50 pages).

Today’s Chronicle of Higher Education includes an article on the current budget situation for the centers program at NSF. (Free for a few days, then requires subscription.) It gets right to the point:

Many researchers warn that a crisis looms for academic supercomputing in the United States, largely because of what they see as the National Science Foundation’s failure to support the technology adequately…Even some advisers to the Bush administration have recently called on government agencies to develop a clearer road map for purchasing and operating cutting-edge supercomputers and for developing supercomputer software.

The usual suspects make their appearances including:

[A]cademic scientists worry that the changes in the mission of these centers and the NSF’s financing decisions could upend American supercomputing research. If none of the incumbents win a new contract from the NSF, building a new supercomputer center from scratch would not be easy or inexpensive, they say. It might not even be smart.

“You don’t build a highway and decide a few years later that you’re going to take it away,” says Kelvin K. Droegemeier, a professor of meteorology at the University of Oklahoma who relies heavily on supercomputers in his research.

Most of you have probably already had this forwarded to your inbox, but transcripts of the testimony delivered by the likes of John Marburger and Anthony Tether to the House Science Committee last week are available online.

Once again, politics rears its ugly head. On one side, the folks charged with discovering and delivering the innovations (namely the researchers). On the other side, the folks charged with investing the nation’s IT research capital (namely the legislators). InfoWorld has an interesting article from last week in which the government attempts to explain the new IT spending initiatives. The fact that DARPA funding is now being channeled in new directions compared to the past is disturbing to many in the academic community. But according to Representative Dana Rohrabacher of California

The question is whether we should channel the amount of money being spent on research into esoteric projects at the universities that may or may not ever come to fruition and help anybody

Evidently, the academians and researchers called upon by the administration for advisory/recommendation purposes either aren’t being heard or are being ignored. Let’s hope that Rep. Rohrabacher’s understanding and opinion of research aren’t shared by the majority of his colleagues. Most academic researchers do meaningful research and they take it seriously as well. Furthermore, basic research has served as the foundation for the multitude of technological accomplishments achieved in this country. Federal budget repositioning isn’t new and no one wants to needlessly throw money away, but new directives issued by the administration are worrisome. The archive for webcasts by the House Committee on Science can be found here http://www.house.gov/science/webcast/index.htm. Check out the Computing Research Policy Blog as well as this ACM blog, which has more information on congressional hearings.

Previous CTWatch blog entries about the IT funding issues are below:
Revitalize HPC, but do it frugally
Federal supercomputing funding: Is it a consensus problem?
Former SecDef on the “technology base”