It should come as no surprise that the global IT markets have an increasing Asian presence. It has long been held that educational systems in countries like China and Japan place a greater premium on math and science than the US. The accuracy of that might be debatable. What’s not debatable is the commitment by the Chinese government to reach new levels of international technological strength. An article at SiliconValley.com describes the effectiveness of some of that country’s policies toward improving its technological standing.

While the article asserts that some of China’s new technological prowess has been both unethically and illegally obtained, it also exposes a potential weakness of our own domestic IT policies - lack of unification. Several blog entries on this site have discussed some of the problems with US policies and the seeming lack of commitment by the US government to clearly understand the importance of adequate funding for all of the components of cyberinfrastructure.

Bill Gates talked about technology education, the dearth of qualified American scientists and engineers, and the “off-shoring” of some of Microsoft’s R&D jobs to China and India on “Morning Edition” today. Listen to the interview on NPR’s website.

He also told your kids to play X-Box as a part of their “balanced” development. Interactive gaming encourages socialization and organizational skills, you see. Sort of like a game of stickball, only without the stick, or the ball, or the leaving the house.

The House has passed the High-Performance Computing Revitalization Act of 2005, which (to borrow the words of Federal Computer Week) “is supposed to resuscitate federal interest in the field.” The bill requires NSF and DOE to guarantee supercomputer access to U.S. researchers, and puts the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy in charge of coordinating federal efforts (currently that’s John Marburger, formerly the head of Brookhaven National Lab). According to FCW, the bill also “asks for better software, standards and training, in addition to hardware.”

The downside? The bill doesn’t include any new funding.

In an HPC Wire article from April 22nd, Dan Reed, Jack Dongarra, and Ken Kennedy question the direction of the government’s investment strategy for high performance computing and computational science. Noting that there are as many opportunities as ever to utilize high-end computing, the three HPC leaders call for better cohesion and greater vision by the federal agencies charged with investing the nation’s computational research dollars:

High-end computing and cyberinfrastructure are both part of a broad and empowering vision of computing-enabled science; it is not an “either or” situation. Both are central, both are critical, and neither can be sacrificed for the other.

The latest notable op-ed on the decline of funding for basic research brings up the question: Is there anyone actually raising their voice in favor of the general reduction in Federal funding for basic research, or for the “repurposing” of DARPA funding for basic Computer Science reseasrch in particular? Arguments defending such cuts are certainly no where in evidence in coverage of this issue recorded by CRP Blog, but I suppose that’s not surprising. This CTWatcher would be very interested to see any pointers to people who argue the other side.

Look for an article in the April 15th edition of the Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription required) titled “Presidential Panel Recommends Steps to Promote Computational Science” that focuses on an as yet unreleased report about research and funding evolution for computational science. In the report, the President’s Information Technology Advisory Panel is calling for new approaches to computational science research. The report states that

universities and federal R&D agencies must make coordinated, fundamental, and structural changes that affirm the integral role of computational science.

Dan Reed of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, who chairs the panel subcommittee that authored the report, calls for new ways of thinking and new ways of working together that will likely require new federal funding incentives to accomplish.

The report calls for both universities and federal agencies to restructure the way they coordinate and conduct joint research to better accommodate cross discipline efforts involving computer science and such fields as chemistry and biology. This line of thinking isn’t really new, but making it a higher priority on the national research agenda is. Word has it the report, “Computational Science: America’s Competitive Challenge”, could be released in a few weeks.