More reminders today, as if we needed them, that the concerned commentary in the US about the decline of federal research funding, in general, and about the decline in investment in academic Computer Science research, in particular, is taking place in a competitive environment where governments outside the US are moving ahead aggresively. This morning’s Grid Today article from Wolfgang Gentzch, “Grid Computing: How Europe is Leading the Pack,” certainly oozes confidence that Europe is on track and on time in terms of grid computing:

“So, what makes Europe so different from other national and international Grid research projects? While early Grid initiatives in Europe where mostly unrelated point efforts (as are still many Grid projects around the world today), my impression from the European Grid Conference in Amsterdam is that, first and foremost, Europe now has a long-term, coordinated and shared Grid R&D vision, mission, strategy, roadmap and funding, driven by the European Commission’s IST Framework Programmes 5, 6 and 7 (the latter will start in 2006) and hosted by its Directorate Generale (DG) for Information Society.”

This claim seems all the more salient because it expresses a sense, coming from various directions, that the process of European unification is releasing a tremendous amount of economic, cultural, and intellectual energy that used to be locked up inside national borders but now flows easily across them. A unified cyberinfrastructure for Europe is both a powerful enabler and a powerful symbol of this transformation. And it doesn’t look like ambition will be in short supply:

“The Grid, for Europe, is far more than resource sharing. It is a big step forward to build the Cyberinfrastructure for a united research community tackling the grand challenges of our universe. It is a coordinated, single economic engine preparing to compete with Asia and the United States. And it is a commitment, through the advancement of next-generation technology, to improve the quality of life for every citizen in Europe.”

So “Old Europe” is looking mighty spry, indeed. The recent news of Spain’s new supercomputer, MareNostrum, is evidence that European cyberinfrastructure activity is occurring on many fronts. As you can see in the slideshow, they’re putting this baby on a raised floor “… in a chapel on the campus of the Polytechnical University in Barcelona.” Repurposing a chapel from the 1920’s as a 21st century supercomputer machine room certainly produces an interesting juxtaposition of centuries and symbols.

In a commentary posted by HPCwire, the issue of federal funding for supercomputing R&D is once again at the forefront. It’s no secret, as we’ve pointed out in several posts here, that the hpc community, especially in academia, is reeling somewhat from the continued reduction in federal funding. A NY Times article (registration required) published today points out that

The Bush team is proposing cutting the Pentagon’s budget for basic science and technology research by 20 percent next year - after President Bush and the Republican Congress already slashed the 2005 budget of the National Science Foundation by $100 million.

The cuts are going beyond hpc, however. In an article titled “Pulling the plug on science?” published yesterday by the Christian Science Monitor, the American Association for the Advancement of Science states:

…while the overall budget for federally funded research and development (R&D) is rising by 0.1 percent, far short of inflation, there are more losers than winners.

More fallout regarding the funding problems can be seen at the Computing Research Policy Blog.

Former Clinton Secretary of Defense William Perry–along with MIT Prof. John Deutch–have an op-ed on proposed funding cuts to the long-term advanced R&D efforts at the defense department. Next year’s budget devotes only about $10 billion of the Pentagon’s $420 budget will be devoted to this “technology base,” down 20 percent from last year.

Perry and Deutch point out:

Of course, the administration and Congress need to make tough budget choices. But to shift money away from the technology base to pay for Iraq, other current military operations or research on large, expensive initiatives, is to give priority to the near term at the expense of the future.

Their line of reasoning is one that is frequently our line of reasoning:

American companies not only draw heavily on the Pentagon’s work, but they have also come to depend on it. The research and development programs of many of America’s major information technology companies are almost exclusively devoted to product development.

In the most recent issue of Communications of the ACM, David Patterson, president of the ACM, makes his own comments on the funding shift at DARPA that we mentioned earlier in the week. He goes one better, discussing the general computer science and engineering funding picture. Among other things, he describes the phrase “very ambitious proposal” as “the kiss of death” when it appears in an NSF review and laments the dimishing funding for long-term research in industry.

“I’m worried and depressed,” said David Patterson, a computer scientist at the University of California, Berkeley who is president of the Association of Computing Machinery, an industry and academic trade group. “I think there will be great technologies that won’t be there down the road when we need them.”

This little bit of sunshine comes from a Saturday New York Times article on DARPA’s shift away from open-ended basic computer science research and toward “more classified work and narrowly defined projects that promise a more immediate payoff. ” NSF’s Peter Freeman and PITAC’s cybersecurity report put in appearances.

The money (literally) quote:

[DARPA officials] revealed that within a relatively steady budget for computer science research that rose slightly from $546 million in 2001 to $583 million last year, the portion going to university researchers has fallen from $214 million to $123 million.

A ranking member of the United Nation’s International Telecommunication Union (ITU), which currently has no real voice in the oversight of the Internet, thinks so. In a Q&A with CNET News, the director of ITU’s Telecommunication Standardization Bureau, Houlin Zhao, says that the ITU would be complementary to the existing organizations currently involved in policy making for the Internet such as ICANN, IETF, and W3C. Perhaps a better question - Is adding another Internet regulatory organization preferable to merging some of the existing ones?