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IT2Tops Federal R&D Priorities for 2000
| Date: | May 1999 |
| Section: | Front Page |
Since the March 1999 issue of CRN, further analysis of the FY 2000 R&D budget request reveals additional agency details about the IT2 initiative, as well as its place in the overall budget.
The FY 2000 budget request for R&D, including facilities and equipment, totals $78.2 billion, about 1 percent below estimated R&D spending in FY 1999. Eliminating defense-sector development - which is projected to decrease by 6 percent - from the equation, aggregate spending on the remaining components would increase by 2 percent. Looking only at basic research, civilian basic research would increase by 4 percent, to more than $17 billion, while defense basic research is projected to decrease by 1 percent.
The Administration notes the following highlights in its R&D budget:
Most of the other emphases in the R&D budget are programs continuing from previous years, meaning that IT2 is the only major new initiative for FY 2000.
Following are descriptions of the FY 2000 budget requests of the key agencies involved in computing research, including their overall budget numbers and their planned computing activities, with emphasis on their roles in IT2.
National Science Foundation (NSF):
The National Science Foundation budget request for FY 2000 is $3.95 billion, an increase of 5.8 percent.
The total budget request for the Computer and Information Sciences and Engineering (CISE) Directorate is $422.5 million, an increase over estimated FY 1999 spending. Most of the increase, $110 million, would be for the IT2 initiative; an additional $13.8 million would be distributed among the existing divisions. The $110 million increment would be divided as follows: $80 million would support increased individual and team research projects and $30 million would be used to establish new IT research centers.
Beyond the initiative, CISE would also increase funding, by nearly $7 million, for the Partnerships for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (PACI) program to focus on broadening and accelerating the capability of the research community to utilize PACI's advanced technology to work on cutting-edge research problems in all NSF disciplines.
CISE would also provide support for research and education efforts associated with the other Foundation-wide efforts, Biocomplexity in the Environment and Educating for the Future. To the former, which is a set of increasingly coordinated activities in environmental science, engineering, and education, CISE would provide $6 million. This would be a 50 percent increase above FY 1999 base funding of $4 million for activities formerly organized under Life and Earth's Environment.
CISE also supports a range of programs that encourage innovative approaches to meeting the challenge of educating students for the 21st century. A total of $22.62 million, an increase of $1.75 million over the FY 1999 level, would support such programs, including Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU), Integrative Graduate Education and Research Training (IGERT), and Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER). Of note, $500,000 would be used to initiate a prototype program in Teaching Experiences for CISE Students, an experiment in having undergraduate and graduate students help bring the challenges, excitement, and rewards of IT into the K-12 learning environment.
The NSF's Education and Human Resources budget request includes $6.8 million to be invested in unspecified information technologies activities. The funding could be distributed among education programs, education research programs, and/or the EPSCoR program.
The EHR budget also includes a line item of $33 million to be spent on strengthening the IT workforce with funds coming from H-1B Nonimmigrant Petitioner Fees, as it was directed to do by the FY 1999 omnibus appropriations bill. At this writing, NSF is still in the process of defining the details and mechanism(s) to be used for these activities. The programs will start in FY 1999 (this year) with $27 million in funds from the same source.
Department of Defense (DoD):
The FY 2000 budget for the Department of Defense includes $1,113 million for basic research, an increase of 0.5 percent above the FY 1999 level, and $2,959 million for applied research, a decrease of 6.1 percent.
DoD would invest $100 million in the IT2 initiative including, $70 million for focused research programs at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA); $20 million for a new Advanced Research and Development Activity (ARDA, a joint effort of the Defense Department and the intelligence community to support long-term research on problems and enabling technologies relevant to intelligence and information security); and $10 million for fundamental IT research through the DoD-wide University Research Initiative, a competitive program managed through the office of the Director of Defense Research and Engineering.
DoD's strategies for IT R&D follow from broader defense and warfighting strategies, developed at higher levels in DoD and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, which identify the growing importance of information superiority to U.S. objectives.
DARPA's total proposed funding for applied research includes $322.9 million for Computing Systems and Communications Technology, reflecting no change from the FY 1999 level; the $70 million for Extensible Information Systems (providing for participation in IT2); and $40 million for the Next Generation Internet initiative, a decrease from the FY 1999 level of $49.5 million.
The Administration budget documents note also that DoD would provide $500 million, a 6.4 percent increase, in R&D funding for advanced critical infrastructure protection technologies, with emphasis on combating cyberterrorism.
Department of Energy (DoE):
The Department of Energy is requesting an $18.1 billion budget for FY 2000, of which $7.5 billion, or 41 percent of the total, would be for R&D. This R&D budget would be about $500 million, or 7 percent, greater than the FY 1999 level. About $2.8 billion of the R&D budget is for civilian activities funded through the Office of Science; the remainder supports DoE's defense and nuclear weapons mission and includes, for instance, the Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative.
DoE's FY 2000 budget would include an increase for the ASCI program as well as new funding for a civilian counterpart, the Scientific Simulation Initiative (SSI), which would be DoE's contribution to the IT initiative. While ASCI serves the DoE's nuclear weapons mission, SSI would be a civilian program with the following goals: 1) to design, develop, and deploy computational simulation capabilities to solve scientific and engineering problems of extraordinary complexity; 2) to discover, develop, and deploy crosscutting computer science, applied mathematics, and other enabling technologies; and 3) to establish a national terascale distributed scientific simulation infrastructure.
Total funding for the Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR) would grow from $157.5 million to $198.9 million, with nearly all of the increase devoted to SSI activities. The primary research unit of ASCR is its Mathematical, Information, and Computational Sciences Division. The MICS budget would grow from $138.8 to $184.6 million in FY 2000.
National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA):
NASA's FY 2000 budget request totals $13.6 billion, which reflects a slight decrease from its FY 1999 budget. With its IT initiative funding, NASA would support activities in three areas: fundamental intelligent systems research focused on advances in software, human-centered computing and information management, and high-end computing; research in applications and use of terascale infrastructure; and training and education efforts. The activities would be designed to serve a number of NASA objectives and missions.
National Institutes of Health (NIH):
The biomedical research agency's budget request is for $15.9 billion, an increase of 2.1 percent over the FY 1999 level. (The NIH budget increased 14.4 percent between FY 1998 and FY 1999.) The NIH's participation in the IT initiative underscores the increasing interdependency of biomedical research and computing.
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA):
NOAA's overall budget would grow from about $2.2 billion to about $2.5 billion, a 13 percent increase. Computer modeling is central to NOAA's missions in weather forecasting and climate research. With its IT2 initiative funding, NOAA would address important challenges in the development and implementation of climate and weather applications for advanced computer architectures, pushing the state of the art in the use of advanced high-speed computing, visualization, and data communications for these applications.
National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST):
NIST's FY 2000 budget request is for $735 million, up from $641 million in FY 1999. NIST laboratory funding for Computer Science and Applied Mathematics would grow by about $3 million to a total of $47.8 million. The additional funds are for development and dissemination of standards, measurements, and testing methodologies needed to protect the information technology elements of critical national infrastructures.
