HIGHLIGHTS:
Computing Research Advocacy Network

Information Technology Initiative

Networking and Information Technology
Research and Development Act

Following is a description of the FY 2000 budget request for R&D focusing on items of interest and relevance to computing research and how they fit into the larger budgetary picture. The information has been compiled from official budget documents, agency websites, and personal communications with agency officials.

Overall Research & Development

The FY 2000 budget request for total R&D, including facilities and equipment, is $78.2 billion, about 1 percent below estimated R&D spending in FY 1999. Without defense-sector development, which is projected to decrease by 6 percent, the total would increase by 2 percent.

R&D Funding by Sector & Type	FY 1998 Actual	FY 1999 Estimate	FY 2000 Proposed	FY 99 - 00 Pct change
Civilian
Basic Research	14,592	16,341	17,074	4%
Applied Research	10,936	11,603	11,598	--
Development	8,174	8,363	8,813	5%
Defense
Basic Research	1,066	1,158	1,152	-1%
Applied Research	4,208	4,531	4,571	1%
Development	34,547	34,127	31,986	-6%
Total
Basic Research	15,658	17,499	18,226	4%
Applied Research	15,144	16,134	16,169	--
Development	42,721	42,490	40,799	-4%
Facilities & Eqpt.				-3%
TOTAL, OVERALL R&D	76,326	79,267	78,242	-1%

(amounts in millions, current dollars)

The Administration is highlighting the following thrusts in its R&D budget:

Information Technology for the Twenty First Century (IT²): The budget provides a total of $1.8 billion, a 28% increase, for IT² and High Performance Computing and Communications. IT² is a new initiative, funded at $366 million in FY 2000, to keep America at the cutting-edge of the Information Revolution by increasing support for fundamental, long-term research, advanced applications, and research on the economic and social implications of information technology.

Strong Support for Basic Research: A 7 percent increase in the National Science Foundation research budget, a 5 percent increase in the Department of Energy's science budget, and a 4 percent increase for NASA's space science research.

Climate Change Technology: The budget provides a 34 percent increase for this initiative, which includes $1.4 billion in R&D on energy efficiency, renewable energy, carbon sequestration, and improvements in nuclear and fossil technologies. The initiative also provides $0.4 billion in tax credits to stimulate adoption of energy efficiency technologies.

Research and Experimentation Tax Credit: The budget proposes extending this credit for one year through 30 June 2000 at a cost of $2.4 billion over five years.

Other emphases include the U.S. Global Change Research Program; the Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles; the Education Research Initiative; the Food Safety Initiative; health and defense research on protecting against chemical and biological weapons, and critical infrastructure protection. Most of those are continuing from past years. The upshot is that IT² is the only major new initiative in the FY 2000 R&D budget.

Information Technology for the Twenty First Century (IT²)

The IT² initiative responds to the recommendations of the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC) made in its Interim Report. The $366 million initiative would support research in three categories: long-term information technology research that will lead to fundamental breakthroughs in computing and communications ($228 million); advanced computing for science, engineering, and the Nation ($123 million); and, research on the economic and social implications of information technologies ($15 million). The latter activity would also include efforts to help train additional information technology workers at universities. Six federal agencies plan to participate in the initiative.

FY 2000 IT2 Budget Proposals	Fundamental Information Technology Research	Advanced Computing for Science & Engineering	Social Implications and Workforce Programs	Total
NSF	100	36	10	146
DoD	100	--	--	100
DoE	6	62	2	70
NASA	18	19	1	38
NIH	2	2	2	6
NOAA	2	4	--	6
TOTAL, IT2	228	123	15	366

(amounts in millions, current dollars)

A new senior management team has been formed within the National Science and Technology Council to set policy and coordinate initiative activities. It will report directly to the President's Advisor for Science and Technology and consist of the Directors or Under Secretaries of the participating agencies as well as senior officials from the Office of Management and Budget and the National Economic Council. The team will assist the President in establishing and monitoring goals for the program and allocating research tasks to the agencies on the basis of their missions and capabilities.

The management team is being supported by a working group chaired by the NSF's Assistant Director for Computer and Information Science and Engineering. The NSF was chosen to lead this group since it is the only agency that will support research in all three thrusts of the initiative. The working group has been charged with preparing research plans and budgets for the entire effort, ensuring that the research projects funded through the initiative result in a sound and balanced research portfolio. High priority has been placed on ensuring that agency funds are distributed in an open, competitive process aimed at supporting the best possible ideas. Administration officials estimate that at least 60 percent of the funding will go to universities.

Descriptions of the planned activities associated with the initiative are incorporated into the agency sections below.

High Performance Computing and Communications and Next Generation Internet

The FY 2000 budget document includes a list of each "participating" agency's spending plans for HPCC activities, including NGI funding.

HPCC Agency Budgets	FY 1998 Actual	FY 1999 Estimate	FY 2000 Proposed	FY 99 - 00 Pct change
Commerce	20	27	27	--
DoD	220	168	207	23.2%
DoE (Civilian)	115	126	116	-7.9%
DoE (Defense)	374	484	543	12.2%
Health & Human Services	98	111	115	3.6%
Environmental Protection Agency	3	4	4	--
NASA	120	93	136	4.6%
NSF	265	301	314	4.3%
TOTAL, HPCC	1,215	1,314	1,462	11.3%

(amounts in millions, current dollars)

However, for purposes of interagency coordination the HPCC program has been succeeded and subsumed by a broader activity referred to as Computing, Information, and Communications (CIC) R&D and coordinated by the National Coordination Office that was established in the HPCC legislation.

Many though not all of the HPCC-labeled activities are included in the CIC set of activities, for which a cross-cut report is typically issued in the fall. The CIC program component areas include High End Computing and Computation, Large Scale Networking, High Confidence Systems, Human Centered Systems, and Education, Training, and Human Resources. The Large Scale Networking component includes the NGI program.

National Science Foundation

The National Science Foundation budget request for FY 2000 is $3.95 billion, an increase of 5.8 percent.

National Science Foundation	FY 1998 Actual	FY 1999 Estimate	FY 2000 Proposed	FY 99 - 00 Pct change
Research & Related Activities	2,572.6	2,809.2	3,004.0	6.9%
Education & Human Resources	633.2	689.0	711.0	3.2%
Major Research Equipment	78.2	90.0	85.0	-5.6%
Administrative Expenses	141.7	149.2	154.5	3.6%
TOTAL, NSF	3,425.7	3,737.4	3,954.5	5.8%

(amounts in millions, current dollars)

NSF is highlighting three areas in its budget request: the IT² initiative, Biocomplexity in the Environment, and Educating for the Future. Nearly all of its proposed funding increase would be devoted to one of these thrusts.

NSF's research and facilities investment in the IT² Initiative would total $146 million: a $110 million research component in the CISE Directorate for support of research on software systems, scaleable information infrastructure, high-end computing, and on the social, economic, and workforce impacts of information technologies; and a $36 million infrastructure component funded through the Major Research Equipment line-item. The latter would provide machine capabilities in the multi-teraflop range, permitting researchers to address problems of scope and scale that are inaccessible with current computer systems. Development locations for the machines will be awarded on a competitive basis. The Education and Human Resources Directorate also plans to spend $6.8 million on activities related to information technologies.

According to the NSF budget documents, the IT² activities "build upon NSF's previous substantial investments within the Computer and Information Science and Engineering Activity, as well as investments under its theme of Knowledge and Distributed Intelligence and other information technology-related projects, which amounts to almost $700 million in FY 1999." Throughout all IT² activities, NSF will emphasize workforce development.

Funding increases for computing research account for about 64 percent of the total requested increase for research. This is clearly reflected in the distribution of the increment among the NSF's research directorates.

NSF Research Directorates	FY 1998 Actual	FY 1999 Estimate	FY 2000 Proposed	FY 99 - 00 Pct change
Biological Sciences	355.7	390.9	408.6	4.5%
Computer & Information S&E	269.1	298.7	422.5	41.5%
Engineering	343.1	368.6	378.5	2.7%
Geosciences	438.0	473.0	485.5	2.6%
Mathematical & Physical Sciences	687.2	734.4	754.0	2.7%
Social, Behav., & Econ. Sciences	126.6	137.2	143.0	4.2%
Integrative Activities*	129.8	161.4	161.2	-0.1%

*includes Biocomplexity initiative and S& T Centers
(amounts in millions, current dollars)

Computer and Information Sciences and Engineering: The budget request for the CISE Directorate is $422.5 million, an increase of $123.8 million, or 41.5 percent, 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.

NSF Computer & Information S&E	FY 1998 Actual	FY 1999 Estimate	FY 2000 Proposed	FY 99 - 00 Pct change
Computer-Communications Research	56.43	60.21	62.23	3.4%
Information & Intelligent Systems	36.17	41.66	43.05	3.3%
Experimental & Integrative Activities	56.52	57.67	59.87	3.8%
Advanced Computational Infrastructure & Research	75.82	78.17	85.4	9.2%
Advanced Networking Infrastructure & Research	44.15	60.97	61.98	1.7%
IT2 Initiative	--	--	110.0	--
TOTAL, CISE	269.09	298.68	422.53	41.5%

(amounts in millions, current dollars)

The IT² Initiative will encompass broad, thematic, large-scale, long-term, basic computer science research, described as "fundamental research required for attacking major software challenges; integrating components for end-to-end performance; and seeding explorations of shifts of current paradigms in computer, software, and network design." The $110.0 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.

The CISE budget documents list the following research topics to be included in support for research projects: building "no-surprise," performance-engineered software systems in a scalable way; developing hardware/software co-design; multiplying individuals' physical and mental capabilities; meeting, working, and collaborating in cyberspace in a world where people interact over the network in a realistic three-dimensional virtual environment; building an infrastructure for storing, searching, and retrieving any kind of content; empowering computational discovery; expanding fundamental algorithm research; facilitating use of terascale systems; enabling broadband tetherless communications; understanding, modeling, and predicting network behavior; integrating end-to-end performance-engineered components; expanding understanding of the impact of social, ethical, economic, political, and legal factors; and developing a more skilled American workforce.

The $30 million centers component would be used to initiate about 10 IT research centers focused on major computer science and engineering research challenges such as broadband tetherless communications; building "no-surprise," performance-engineered software systems; and multiplying the physical and mental capabilities of individuals. Within their fundamental research mission, these centers may incorporate testbeds and would have significant education, training and outreach components. Some may be "virtual," linking distributed institutions with specialized, complimentary expertise and instrumentation though high performance networks; others may be sited at a single location.

All of CISE's IT² activities would be integrated with the Terascale Computing Systems infrastructure project funded through the Major Research Equipment account.

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's role is to strengthen the information-processing base essential to biocomplexity work. Highlights include cooperative research in such areas as genome sequencing tools, protein motif recognition, ecological data repositories, pattern recognition tools, as well as in the broader areas of storage and retrieval in massive databases, simulation and modeling, and tools for remote observation and experimentation. Although the techniques are general in their applicability, the cooperative projects would be concentrated in biodiversity and ecosystem Dynamics.

CISE also supports a range of programs that encourage innovative approaches to meeting the challenge of educating students for the 21^st 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.

Education and Human Resources: The budget request for the EHR Directorate is $711.0 million, an increase of $21.9 million, or 3.2 percent, over estimated FY 1999 spending. It 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. According to the Director of the Undergraduate Education Division, "As required by the legislation, NSF will 1) operate a scholarship program for financially needed students (at the associate, baccalaureate, and graduate levels) for students intending to pursue degrees in mathematics, computer science, and engineering, 2) support K-12 systemic reform activities, and 3) support grants for mathematics, engineering, or science enrichment courses." 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

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; $20 million for a new Advanced Research and Development Activity; 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.

Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency: DARPA's applied research account includes $322.9 million for Computing Systems and Communications Technology, reflecting no change from the FY 1999 level; $70 million for Extensible Information Systems, a new account to provide for participation in IT²; and $40 million for the Next Generation Internet initiative, a decrease from the FY 1999 level of $49.5 million. DARPA's participation in the new initiative would be consistent with its overall investment strategy of concentrating on high-payoff ideas and technologies with vision and focus. Research areas would include software; human-computer interaction and information management; scalable networks; and high-end computing.

Advanced Research and Development Activity: ARDA is 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.

Critical Infrastructure Protection: 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

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.

Scientific Simulation Initiative: The Office of Science plans to devote $70 million to the Scientific Simulation Initiative as DoE's contribution to IT2. This funding would include $52 million through the Office of Advanced Scientific Computation for computer science and enabling technology, basic science applications, and facility operations; $10 million through the Biological and Environmental Research account for global environmental simulation research; and $7 million through Basic Energy Sciences for combustion systems simulation research.

DoE's plans for the IT initiative, which mostly fall under the advanced computing category, are far more well defined than the other agencies' at this point. A new program, the Strategic Simulation Initiative, would be established to build on the existing Accelerated Strategic Computing 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.

DoE will initially focus, in support of its first SSI goal, on two major simulation projects that are critical to the agency's mission, have urgent deadlines, are of high scientific impact, and are well positioned to take advantage of computing capabilities on the scale of trillions of calculations per second: global systems and combustion systems. In addition, a number of applications in basic science that fulfill these criteria, e.g., genomics, will be initiated.

Toward the second SSI goal, DoE will focus on the development of the computer science and applied mathematics technologies that enable the advances noted above in the scientific applications. Critical to the success of the applications is the development and deployment of advanced technology in computational algorithms and methods, and software libraries; problem solving and code development environments and tools; distributed computing and collaborative environments; visualization and data management systems; and computer systems architecture and hardware strategies. The Department's efforts in crosscutting and enabling technologies are expected to both drive and profit from fundamental research in information technology.

With respect to the third goal, The hardware strategy will be driven by the applications requirements and will be based on the acquisition of a balanced system of advanced computers for computational methods and software development as well as the demanding applications described above. The department plans to buy computers with an aggregate capacity of 5 teraflops in FY 2000 and 40 teraflops by the year 2003. Local random-access memory, online disk, and archival storage will increase from 1-2 terabytes, 30-40 terabytes, and approximately 5 petabytes, respectively, in FY 2000 to 10-15 terabytes, 300-500 terabytes, and 15-20 petabytes, respectively, in FY 2003. The greatly expanding computational capacity of these resources coupled with the distributed nature of the scientific teams collaborating on the applications requires advanced communications capabilities to support distributed collaborations, distributed simulations, remote visualizations, remote steering of computations, and the sharing of huge datasets.

Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research: The Office of Science's Office of Advanced Scientific Computation would grow from $157.5 million to $198.9 million, with nearly all of the increase to be devoted to its 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.

DoE/CTR/Math, Info, & Computational Sciences	FY 1998 Actual	FY 1999 Estimate	FY 2000 Proposed	FY 99 - 00 Pct change
Math, Computational , & Computer Sciences Research	47.86	51.56	71.40	38.5%
Applied Mathematics	23.58	25.23	27.18	7.7%
Computer Science	14.00	14.00	14.00	--
Advanced Computing Software Tools	5.00	5.00	5.00	--
Scientific Applications Pilot Projects	5.28	7.33	3.79	-48.3%
SSI Algorithms, Models, Methods, & Libraries	--	--	2.95	--
SSI Problem Solving Environments & Tools	--	--	2.92	--
SSI Distributed Computing & Collaboration Tech.	--	--	2.92	--
SSI Visualization & Data Management Systems	--	--	6.82	--
SSI Basic Science Applications	--	--	5.84	--
Advanced Computation & Communications Research	76.17	83.80	108.68	29.7%
Networking	5.99	4.50	4.50	--
Collaboratory Tools	3.00	3.00	3.00	--
National Collaboratory Pilot Projects	3.00	3.00	3.00	--
National Energy Research Scientific Comp. Ctr.	26.50	26.50	27.50	3.8%
Advanced Computing Research Facilities	22.90	17.41	11.88	-31.8%
Energy Sciences Network	14.79	14.79	14.79	--
Next Generation Internet	--	14.60	14.60	--
SSI Computing Facilities & Network Infrastructure	--	--	29.42	--
TOTAL, MICS	124.03	138.83	184.58	33.0%

(amounts in millions, current dollars)

Other Agencies

National Aeronautics and Space Administration: 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. For instance, they would include research on automated reasoning to enable greater use of robotics in space exploration; computing research to improve technologies for understanding and managing large and distributed streams of data, such as those generated in earth observation activities; and development of an Intelligent Synthesis Environment testbed for reducing the costs of space transportation.

National Institutes of Health: 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. Its IT activities-in software and algorithm R&D, high-end computing, and workforce training-would be designed to meet the needs of biomedical research and researchers, especially in bioinformatics, imaging and statistical analysis, simulation methods for implementing realistic models of biological systems, and processing large data sets.

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration: 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 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. By improving their models and making them work with the latest technologies, NOAA would expect improvements in its ability to forecast hurricanes, tornaDoEs, medium- and long-term climate, as well as in routine weather forecasting.

National Institute of Standards and Technology: 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 $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.

References

The FY 2000 budget request: http://www.whitehouse.gov/WH/New/Budget2000
OSTP's R&D budget overview: http://www.whitehouse.gov/WH/EOP/OSTP/html/1999_2_1.html
Background paper on IT²: http://www.ccic.gov/it2/initiative.pdf
NSF's budget documents: http://www.nsf.gov/bfa/bud/fy2000/start.htm
DoD's R&D budget documents: http://www.dtic.mil/comptroller/FY2000budget
DoE's budget documents: http://www.cfo.DoE.gov/budget/00budget/index.htm
DoE's SSI site: http://www.er.DoE.gov/ssi
NIH's budget brief: http://www4.od.nih.gov/ofm/budget/pressbriefing.stm
Department of Commerce's budget index: http://www.doc.gov/bmi/budget/PB2000/bibtoc.htm

 

Prepared by Lisa Thompson, Computing Research Association last updated March 17, 1999