Reed's Ruminations: A Blog by Dan Reed

NITRD: Come, Let Us Reason Together

On Wednesday, July 31, I testified to the U.S. House Committee on Commerce, Science and Technology in the Rayburn Building on Capitol Hill. The full committee hearing, chaired by Rep. Bart Gordon, was on oversight of the Networking, Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) program and the 2007 report of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), entitled, Leadership Under Challenge: Information Technology R&D in a Competitive World. Some of you may remember that George Scalise (Semiconductor Industry Association) and I co-chaired the PCAST subcommittee that produced this report, which reviewed the U.S. NITRD program.

The complete hearing charter is on the Committee web site.  UPDATE: A video of the complete hearing is now online. (Click on the icon at the upper right of the web page.)

The other members of the hearing panel were

• Chris Greer, Director, NITRD National Coordination Office (NNCO)
• Craig Stewart,Chair, Coalition for Academic Computing (CASC), Associate Dean, Indiana University
• Don Winter, Vice President, Engineering and Information Technology, Phantom Works, Boeing 

Participating in the Process

In response to the PCAST report, the Federal Subcommittee on NITRD has issued a request for information (RFI) to a five year strategic plan, which will "…focus primarily on R&D goals that require interagency coordination, including multi-agency investments and joint programs, and respond to the priorities of the Federal government as a whole." You can find the full text of the RFI in the Federal Register and here on the NITRD web site. The deadline for responses is August 25, 2008, and I strongly encourage you to participate.

Finally, for you high-performance computing (HPC) readers scoring this at home, I remain a passionate advocate of HPC as an enabler of innovation and scientific discovery. In that spirit, remember the following excerpt from the 1999 President's IT Advisory Committee (PITAC) report (when the committee was co-chaired by Bill Joy and the late Ken Kennedy), which recommended Expeditions to the 21^st Century, that would

… report back to the Nation what could be accomplished by using technologies that are quantitatively and qualitatively more powerful than those available today. In essence, these centers will create "time machines" to enable the early exploration of technologies that would otherwise be beyond reach for many years.

A Few Observations    

In my testimony, I made some of the same points I have made repeatedly, namely the importance of strategic planning, interagency coordination and balanced participation, an appropriate mix of low and high risk projects and periodic reevaluation of our plans and portfolio. The key takeaways, from my perspective, are

• Taking the long view, as innovative, high risk research rarely has immediate payoffs. Indeed, in many cases the reward is not apparent until ten or even twenty years later. As they say in the sporting world, "No guts, no glory."
• Creating a strategic R&D roadmap for interagency planning and collaboration, along with some metrics that have enough specificity to determine if agencies are meeting expectations. (Note that I am not recommending planned outcomes – that is the definition of development, not research – but stretch objectives that inspire and motivate both the agencies and the community.)
• Fixing our national image of IT and our computing curricula, so they are more multidisciplinary and relevant and are more attractive to a diverse workforce. Many groups, including CRA and ACM are working on this.
• Rebalancing agency participation in a more equitable way, as the diversity of agency approaches has been a historical strength. More to the point, some agencies are not supporting their fair share of the work at present.
• Funding the America COMPETES Act to address funding shortfalls and address pressing needs in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) fields.
• Reconstituting the President's IT Advisory Committee (PITAC) to regularly (perhaps annually) review the NITRD program and its progress against strategic plans. Eight years elapsed between the 1999 PITAC assessment of the NITRD program and the 2007 PCAST reassessment. In computing, eight years is multiple technology lifetimes.

My oral testimony follows, with the key points highlighted. Within a few weeks, my written testimony and that of the other witnesses will be posted on the Committee's hearing page, and in due time (many months), our oral testimony will also appear in the Congressional Record.

Oral Testimony

Good morning, Mr. Chairman and Members of the Committee. I am Daniel Reed, Chair of the Board of Directors for the Computing Research Association (CRA) and co-chair of the PCAST subcommittee that produced the 2007 NITRD program assessment.

Today, I would like to make five points regarding the NITRD program, followed by a set of specific recommendations for the future.

Information Technology, NITRD and Innovation

Information technology, driven by basic research investments, has transformed our society and our economy. Imagine a world without personal computers, mobile devices or the Internet, without rich computational models or deep data mining. The future can be even more amazing – if we sustain our IT research ecosystem.

Historically, the diversity of our NITRD agencies has been a major strength, fostering multiple approaches to complex problems. The Internet began as a DARPA project, grew with National Science Foundation (NSF) support and blossomed with commercial funding. The Human Genome Project was a triumph of biomedicine and IT, building on NIH, DARPA, NSF and DOE research and birthing personalized medicine.

This brings me to my second point, balancing risk and participation.

Research Horizons and Risks: The Funding Monoculture

Today, the NITRD ecosystem's health is threatened, due to an over-dependence on a single funding source and inadequate research funding overall. DARPA's retreat from fundamental computing research at U.S. universities unbalanced the NITRD ecosystem. NSF now provides 86 percent of all academic IT research funding, and fierce competition has driven researchers to focus on short-term, low risk projects. Like a stock portfolio, our long-term success depends on planning, balance and regular reassessment.

This brings me to my third point, NITRD coordination and planning.

NITRD Coordination: Strategic Planning and Execution

In general, the NITRD program has effectively fostered informal communication and coordination across agencies. However, the focus on individual agency agendas has made the NITRD program much less effective in managing coordinated projects, particularly multidisciplinary ones of rising importance

This brings me to my fourth point, research opportunities and foci.

Research Priority Areas: Identifying Innovation Foci

In 2007, PCAST revisited the priority areas identified by PITAC in 1999, concluding they remained deeply relevant. IT systems that interact with the physical world, a special case of software systems, emerged as the new top priority. These cyber-physical systems embed computing, sensors and actuators in objects that span scales from our national infrastructure to implanted biomedical devices. Their creation also requires workers with new, ever more multidisciplinary skills.

This brings me to my fifth point, sustaining the IT workforce.

Workforce: Ensuring Quality and Quantity

Today, IT has a serious image problem, affecting workforce quantity, diversity and quality. Many groups are working to dispel stereotypes and create new, multidisciplinary curricula, but much work remains. We must also do more to retain the best and brightest international students who obtain graduate degrees here. Our international competitiveness depends on the availability of qualified and diverse workforce.

This leads to my recommendations for the future.

Remaining Competitive: A Call to Action

To ensure the health of the U.S. IT ecosystem, we should fully fund the America COMPETES Act. This will fuel the IT innovation engine – fundamental research by U.S. universities and laboratories -- and broaden STEM education. I commend you and your colleagues, Mr. Chairman, for working hard on this effort.

Second, we must rebalance participation in the NITRD program so the responsibility for fundamental research is not borne by one agency. Third, we must create and regularly update a strategic R&D plan and associated metrics that define interagency accountabilities, with a mix of project scales and research risks.

Finally, we must regularly review our research investment against the strategic plan. I also believe the NITRD program is best served by a standalone and active PITAC composed of computing experts from academia and industry. Eight years between NITRD reviews has been far too long.

Mr. Chairman, thank you and this Committee for your interest in the future of the NITRD program and its importance to U.S. competitiveness and national security. At the appropriate time, I would be pleased to answer any questions you might have.

Showing Up and Two Corollaries

"Eighty to ninety percent of life is showing up." The line has been variously attributed to Yogi Berra, Woody Allen or even an anonymous wag. It's wise, though obvious advice – showing up and doing the expected generally allows one to avoid a host of problems. Appearing for jury duty avoids one being held in contempt of court, and you can't fly if you don't show up at the airport on time.  I was reflecting on the implications of "showing up" while at a recent meeting in Italy.

Show Up and See What Happens

My friend, Dave Turek, IBM's Vice President for Deep Computing, once explained IBM's open source and Linux strategy by saying that IBM had a deeply considered, two phase strategy for Linux and clusters for HPC, "Show up and see what happens." As he once remarked at an NCSA Private Sector Partners (PSP) meeting, "We've showed up. Now, we are waiting to see what happens."

At NCSA, we partnered with IBM in 2001 to deploy two of the first large-scale commodity clusters for open scientific use: two 1 teraflop systems based on Intel Pentium III and Itanium processors. At the time, this was a radical, almost heretical idea – deploying commodity PC clusters as production HPC platforms. Of course, such commodity clusters now dominate the Top500 list.

In a reprise of this experience, Microsoft and NCSA recently partnered to deploy Windows HPC Cluster 2008 on the latest incarnation of commodity cluster hardware. (The customer story has the technical details). I don't generally evangelize for Microsoft products in this blog, but I was very impressed that Windows HPC Cluster achieved substantially higher performance on the same hardware than did Linux. Microsoft, in the form of Kyril Faenov's HPC team, has definitely "showed up" in this space in a big way, and I think there are great opportunities to offer not only Windows compute clusters but also backend acceleration for desktop applications. Of course, all of this is ultimately connected to the ferment in cloud computing.

Avoid the Obviously Wrong

At the recent Cetraro meeting on High-Performance Computing and Grids, Miron Livny extended the "show up and see what happens" maxim by offering a corollary, "Show up and avoid doing something stupid." His observation was that evolutionarily, human success was defined by avoiding being trampled by a woolly mammoth, eaten by a hungry Bengal tiger or falling into a crevasse.

The computing implication of Livny's corollary is that one should do reasonable things when presented with opportunities. In terms of research infrastructure, this means avoiding our academic tendency to delight in second system syndrome – building complex systems that embody all of our personally favorite features without determining if they are either needed or useful.

At Cetraro, we debated the impact of the multicore revolution, the similarities and differences between Grids and clouds, and the commonalities between future exascale systems and the architecture of megascale data centers. (By the way, if you have not read the Department of Energy's exascale computing study, I highly recommend it.)

There are deep technical challenges in all of these areas. However, we must avoid being trampled by the woolly mammoths; this domain is fraught with academic, government and industrial politics. I believe we need a wider dynamic range (time horizon, risk/reward and fiscal scale) of research and development projects if we are to solve these problems.

I have made this point many times, most recently as part of the PCAST report on the U.S. NITRD program. I am scheduled to testify about this again to the House Science and Technology Committee on July 31. I will report on the hearing in August.

Do Simple Things Quickly

At the same Cetraro meeting, I opined that there was a second corollary, "Do the obvious, simple things quickly." I think this is the key lesson to be drawn from web2.0 mashups, and the rapid evolution of commercial clouds. The simplicity of the APIs and hosted infrastructure encourages external groups to innovate rapidly. We have seen the clear evidence of this in the explosive growth in social networking sites and in the hosted services that have appeared.

By contrast, I think this is one of the places we have struggled with academic Grids. The software has often been too complex, and this complexity has been engendered by the distributed nature of the participating organizations, requiring "glue code" to integrate disparate policies and infrastructure across virtual organizations. In contrast, mashups and cloud services can be deployed quickly (by academic standards) using very simple APIs and service level agreements (SLAs). It will be interesting to see how the Grid/Cloud mashup evolves.