We are pleased to introduce CISE Bytes, the first in a series of columns from Jeannette Wing, Assistant Director of NSF for CISE. They will provide brief items of interest about the people in CISE and activities within the directorate.

Personnel Updates

I am pleased to announce that Sampath Kannan, University of Pennsylvania, started July 1 as the new Director for the Computing and Communications Foundations Division. Also joining CISE in the past year are the following program directors:  Mitra Basu (US Naval Academy), Michael Branicky (Case Western), Chita Das (Penn State), Krishna Kant (Intel), David McDonald (UW), Paul Oh (Drexel), Joan Peckham (URI), and Lenore Zuck (UI/Chicago).

Joining the CISE Advisory Committee in the past year are Anant Agarwal (MIT), Michelle Effros (Cal Tech), Carla Ellis (Duke), Eric Horvitz (Microsoft Research), Jon Kleinberg (Cornell), Andrea Lawrence (Spelman), Jeffrey MacKie-Mason (Michigan), Maja Matari? (USC), Greg Morrisett (Harvard), Don Norman (Northwestern), and Vijay Raghavan (Louisiana).

Many thanks go to the program directors who rotated out of CISE this past year: David Du, Le Gruenwald, George Lee, Wayne Lutters, Allison Mankin, Sirin Tekinay, and Joseph Urban; and to the advisory committee members who rotated off in the past year: Al Aho, Andrea Arpaci-Dusseau, Brian Blake, David Clark, Bill Dally, David Farber, Stephanie Forrest, Yolanda Gil, John King, Antonio Lopez, Rico Malvar, Robin Murphy, Roz Picard, and Dave Tennenhouse.

Finally, I wish to express a special huge thanks to Michael Foster, who retired this summer after 16 years of service to NSF. He was a beloved manager of CCF staff and a source of stability and wisdom for CISE. He will be sorely missed!

Two Clusters Are Better Than One

Many of you are aware of the Google and IBM partnership with CISE, but may have missed the announcement about our second partnership with HP, Intel, Yahoo! and UIUC. CISE now has made available to the entire academic community two clusters: Google and IBM provide a software service layer for one; HP, Intel, Yahoo! and UIUC provide access to the bare machine as well as to the software and services for another. This second cluster represents yet another model of an academia-industry-government partnership that is a win-win-win for all.

Both clusters are resources available to awardees funded through the FY08 Cluster Exploratory (CluE) program, which has seeded our FY09 Data-Intensive Computing program. The new FY09 program is more broadly focused on data-intensive computing, not just cluster-based computing.
CISE welcomes other novel ways of engagement with the private sector that will benefit the academic community.