Communications - March 2011

Research and Development | DOI: 10.1145/1897852.1897861
Tom Geller
evaluating
Government funding
Presidential report asserts the value of U.S. government
funding and specifies areas needing greater focus.

IS COMPuteR SCienCe rightly part of public education? How much does the U.S. govern- ment spend on basic network- ing and IT research? Should industry provide that funding instead? How important is supercomputing?

These are some of the questions addressed by a 148-page report released by the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) last December. Titled Designing a Digital Future: Federally Funded Research and Development in Networking and Information Technology, the report looked at U.S. investments in the cross-agency Networking and Information Technology Research and Development ( NI-TRD) program, currently totaling approximately $4.3 billion per year.

Among other points, the council called for affirmation of computer science as a part of education in science, technology, engineering, and math; increased investment in the areas of privacy, human-computer interaction, massive data stores, and physical instrumentation such as sensors and robotics; long-term, multi-agency NIT initiatives for health, energy, transportation, and security; better coordination among agencies by the Office of Science and Technology Policy and the National Science and Technology Council; and a standing committee to provide ongoing strategic perspectives.

oFFICIal whIte house Photo by Pete souZa

The report also warned against single-minded performance metrics when evaluating high-performance computing (HPC) projects—a subject made timely by Top500’s most-recent ranking of the world’s fastest supercomputers, which appeared five weeks before PCAS T released its report. The Chinese-built Tianhe-1A supercomputer topped that list, bumping U.S.-made computers from the lead spot for the first time in six years. The report stated that “com-

President obama enjoys a lighthearted moment with members of the President’s council of advisors on science and technology during a meeting at the White house.

parative rankings of the world’s fastest
supercomputers” are “relevant to only
some of our national priorities,” and
said that they shouldn’t “ ‘crowd out’
the fundamental research in computer
science and engineering that will be re-
quired to develop truly transformation-
al next-generation HPC systems.”
PCAST called for an increase of $1
billion in funding for “new, potentially
transformative NIT research” and rec-
ommended more specific accounting
to separate basic NIT research from in-
frastructure costs. The report’s Work-
ing Group Co-chair and University of
Washington Professor Ed Lazowska
was quick to point out that the money
was used in ways that are “appropriate
and important”—for example, large-
scale genome databases—although not
“pushing the forefront of NIT.”
Independent technology reviews
of this sort were mandated under the
High-Performance Computing Act of
1991. The previous review, published in
2007, “found many of the same issues”
according to that report’s co-chair, Mi-
crosoft Corporate Vice President Daniel
Reed. But he did note some changes of
focus, such as the marked increase in
data. “We’ve gone from a world where
data was rare and precious to where
we’re drowning in it,” Reed says.