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CRA Bulletin
March 20, 2001

• CSCE Ph.D. Production in 2000 was Lowest in Ten Years
• IBM's Blue Gene Aims to Become Fastest Supercomputer
• Growth of Discretionary Spending Slows in Bush's Preliminary FY2002 Budget Plan
• NSF's Terascale Computing System Exceeds Expectations
• Lucent Closes Silicon Valley Lab
• MIT Negotiating to Open Media Lab in India
• NSF Reports Unprecedented R&D Growth in 2000
• Federal Reserve Suggests Easing of IT Labor Shortage
• NSF Announces New Funding to ADVANCE Women
• Undergraduate Exposure to Research Yields Ph.D. Recipients

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Only 881 CSCE Ph.D. degrees were granted in the U.S. and Canada in 2000, the lowest number in ten years, according to the Computing Research Association's Taulbee Survey. All other trends for future Ph.D. production show increases. Total enrollments in Ph.D. programs increased 10% from last year and the number of students entering programs, passing their qualifiers and passing their thesis proposal exams also increased. At the same time, the continuing rise in the number of bachelor's and master's students has created a strong demand for faculty that is not being met by current Ph.D. production levels. Long-term supply seems to be improving but the production of new Ph.D. degrees will, at best, increase only slightly over the next several years.

The Taulbee Survey is the principal source of information on the enrollment, production, and employment of Ph.D.s in CS & CE and in providing salary and demographic data for faculty in CS & CE. The 1999/2000 results are available at http://www.cra.org/statistics/

IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center is building what will be the fastest supercomputer, with speeds surpassing one petaflop (1,000 teraflops). It will achieve this through a combination of massive parallelism (1 million processors), and new computer architecture approaches: the system will be built through the replication of a large number of identical chips, each containing multiple processors, memory and communication logic. Simultaneous multithreading will be used at each processor to hide memory latency and simplify microprocessor design.

The machine, called Blue Gene, will initially be used to model the folding of human proteins and reflects both the increasing importance of computing in biology and the potential financial value of new discoveries. Proteins fold into highly complex, three-dimensional shapes that determine their function. Any change in shape dramatically alters the function of a protein, and even the slightest change in the folding process can turn a desirable protein into a disease. Better understanding of how proteins fold will give scientists and doctors better insight into diseases and ways to combat them.

More information is available at the Blue Gene Project site, http://www.research.ibm.com/bluegene/index.html. Information for this article was drawn from this site as well as from The Economist: http://www.economist.com/science/displayStory.cfm?Story_id=442962

President Bush released a preliminary FY 2002 budget blueprint late last month with a broad outline of the Administration's fiscal priorities. The plan includes a significant slowing of growth in discretionary spending, from which all federal research programs are funded. The R&D budgets of the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Defense would get substantial increases, but the National Science Foundation, for instance, would see no real growth and other science programs, those at the Department of Energy for instance, would be subject to spending cuts. The blueprint did not include any information on the information technology initiatives of the science agencies.

Many members of Congress, including the Chairs of relevant funding committees, expressed concern about the preliminary budget's treatment of R&D programs. The full details of the President's budget request are expected to be released the first week of April, at which point Congress will begin its annual appropriations process.

President Bush's FY 2002 budget blueprint:
http://w3.access.gpo.gov/usbudget/fy2002/pdf/blueprnt.pdf

Sample of reaction from Congress:
http://www.house.gov/science_democrats/releases/01mar01.htm

An editorial regarding the budget proposals by Thomas Kalil, former deputy assistant to the president for technology and economic policy in the Clinton administration and current adjunct fellow with the New America Foundation:
http://www.newamerica.net/frames/fr_articles_2k.html

AAAS's analysis of R&D spending in the budget blueprint:
http://www.aaas.org/spp/dspp/rd/prel02p.htm

CRA's Government Affairs website FY 2002 Budget page:
http://www.cra.org/govaffairs/budget/

This high-performance computing system, housed at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC), began successful operations ahead of its February 1, 2001 schedule. Eventually TCS will be the fastest system in the world for civilian research, exceeding 6 teraflops.

The initial TCS configuration has 64 interconnected Compaq ES40 Alphaservers, each of which features four EV67 microprocessors. By October, those servers and chips are to be replaced by more than 682 faster Alphaservers, each with four of Compaq's new EV68 chips. Using LINPACK software - a standard performance test in which linear-algebra equations are the benchmark - the initial TCS achieved 75 percent of peak performance. That's speedy enough to rank 70^th among supercomputing systems worldwide, despite its being just partially configured.

PSC is preparing the system for April 1, when researchers nationwide will begin in earnest to use TCS for projects with potential benefits such as more-accurate storm, climate and earthquake predictions; more-efficient combustion engines; better understanding of chemical and molecular factors in biology; and progress in understanding physical, chemical and electrical properties of materials. Access to the system is allocated competitively based on proposals to an independent review panel overseen by NSF.

The NSF Press Release for TCS is available at http://www.nsf.gov/od/lpa/news/press/01/pr0107.htm. Information about working with PSC can be found at http://www.psc.edu/.

The New York Times reported that the Palo Alto research center for Lucent's Bell Laboratories has closed after a year and a half, laying off 18 researchers. Lucent's inability to hire staff quickly and to compete with jobs offered by startups were blamed for the failure.

The NYT article can be found at http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/07/technology/07LUCE.html
Though free, you will have to register with NYT in order to view the article.

Planning is underway for MIT to open a Media Lab in India with an annual budget reportedly between $50m and $100m, and as much investment as $1 billion over the next ten years. If implemented, the lab would have a larger budget than both MIT's U.S. and Irish Media Labs. While some funding would come from the Indian government, most would come from corporate sponsors who would then have access to the Lab's research. The Wall Street Journal reports that the proposed Indian lab would differ from its American and Irish counterparts in that research would be conducted at multiple sites and would include more emphasis on the impact of technology on education. The U.S. Lab was founded in 1985 and aims to provide "a unique environment to explore basic research and applications, without regard to traditional divisions among disciplines."

Articles about the proposed lab can be found at TheStandard website at http://www.thestandard.com/article/display/0,1151,22636,00.html and ZDNet, at http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2686309,00.html. The U.S. Media Lab website is http://www.media.mit.edu

US R&D expenditures (for basic research, applied research, and development) continued to rise for the sixth year in a row. The 6% per year growth rate makes the past six years the greatest period of growth in R&D expenditure in any six-year period since tracking began in 1953. Basic research grew by 5.8% in 2000 and represented 17.2% of all R&D expenditure. Industry (not counting the Federally Funded Research and Development Centers) was responsible for 75.4% of the nation’s total R&D and 31% of the basic research. Industry R&D was largely self-funded (88.2%). The 11.8% of industry R&D funded by government was a significant percentage drop compared to 1987 (31.9%). Universities conducted 11.4% of all R&D and 44.3% of basic research. The United States spends more in absolute dollars on R&D than any other country. R&D expenditure as a percentage of gross national product is greater in the United States (2.59%) than Germany (2.29%), France (2.18%), United Kingdom (1.83%), Canada (1.64%), and Italy (1.02%), but it trails Japan (3.06%).

For more information, see "Sixth Year of Unprecedented R&D Growth Expected in 2000," National Science Foundation, Division of Science Resource Studies Data Brief, NSF 01-310, November 29, 2000, http://www.nsf.gov/sbe/srs/databrf/nsf01310/sdb01310.htm

Federal Reserve Suggests Easing of IT Labor Shortage

The March Federal Reserve Board "Beige Book" reports that the IT labor market, though still tight, is characterized lately by a less rapid turnover in staff and a softening demand for workers. There has been some easing of wage pressures, as well as of signing bonuses and special compensation packages but this has been balanced in part by increases in health benefit costs. The Beige Book is a wide-ranging summary of the economic conditions in the country that is published eight times a year.

The report is available at http://www.federalreserve.gov/FOMC/BeigeBook/2001/20010307/FullReport.htm

The National Science Foundation announced a new funding program called "ADVANCE: Increasing the Participation and Advancement of Women in Academic Science and Engineering." In FY 2001 this pilot program will offer three types of awards: (1) Fellows Awards will enable promising individuals to establish or reestablish full-time independent academic research and education careers in institutions of higher learning; (2) Institutional Transformation Awards will support academic institutional transformation to promote the increased participation and advancement of women scientists and engineers in academe; and (3) Leadership Awards will recognize the outstanding contributions by organizations and/or individuals who have enabled the increased participation and advancement of women in academic science and engineering careers, and will enable awardees to sustain, intensify and initiate new activities designed to make further progress. The Leadership Awards can have a duration of up to 3 years and an amount up to $200,000. Optional letters of intent for this program are due April 1; the full proposals are due May 8, 2001.

More information can be found at http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2001/nsf0169/nsf0169.htm

A consortium of research and teaching institutions known as "The Leadership Alliance" has seen its first group of program alumni become Ph.D. recipients. The Alliance’s Summer Research Early Identification Program (SR-EIP) seeks to increase participation in graduate programs and research careers by underrepresented students through exposure to research during the undergraduate years. The SR-EIP program matches undergraduate students with a faculty or private sector research mentor for eight to ten weeks of practical and theoretical training in research and scientific experimentation and other scholarly investigations. As students continue through the academic pipeline, the Alliance offers other support and services. It has sponsored and funded tutorials and GRE prep for its program alumni and it offers pre-doctoral and dissertation fellowships. The first crop of the Leadership Alliance’s fellows has earned their doctorate degrees and nine of ten of these new Ph.D. recipients have accepted faculty positions. "Since its inception, the Alliance has been dedicated to the goal of helping students from underrepresented groups find their way into and through the academic pipeline and on to valuable research careers," said Dr. Jim Wyche, the Alliance’s executive director.

For more information on the Leadership Alliance and its programs, visit http://www.theleadershipalliance.org