CRA's Lazowska to testify at HPCC renewal hearing

Ed Lazowska, a CRA Board member and chair of the Committee on Government Affairs, was scheduled to testify for CRA on the High-Performance Computing and Communications Act at an October 31 hearing of the House Science Subcommittee on Basic Research. Lazowska is chair of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington.

The HPCC Act is now four years into its five-year term, and the subcommittee is looking in to whether the law has been successful and if it should be reauthorized.

CRA has been active in the HPCC legislative debate for several years. It advised the (then) Committee on Science and Technology on the drafting of the original bill, including testimony by Paul Young, then chair of CRA. At that time, CRA strongly urged that the bill specifically establish support of basic research and human resources as one of the main program objectives.

Two years ago when a follow-on bill (HR 1757) was being considered by Congress, CRA again testified and participated in discussions on the shape of the legislation. That legislation was passed by both houses in different forms but never got out of a conference to reconcile the two. The problems arose not with the HPCC bill but with unrelated legislation in the Senate version.

Lazowska's testimony will be posted on CRA's Web page (http://www.cra.org).

The members of CRA's Government Affairs Committee are Lazowska, John Guttag of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Jeff Ullman of Stanford University, Robert Cartwright of Rice University, John White of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, William Wulf of the University of Virginia and Randy Katz of the University of California at Berkeley.