Budget Cuts Mean Layoffs for Supercomputing Staff at NASA

On March 28, 2005, In Funding, People, Policy, R&D in the Press, By Peter Harsha

Federal Computer Week has a depressing article today on the impact of recent and planned cuts to NASA’s IT programs. The agency’s IT R&D programs are due to decline $66 million in FY 2005, with a further cut of $89 million requested in the President’s FY 2006 budget — a figure that would represent a total cut of 60 percent since FY 2004. The Administration says that NASA’s investments in IT R&D in FY 2006 will be reduced across the board, largely due to redirected funding to the President’s Moon/Mars initiative and the Space Shuttle Return to Flight program — the same reason given for the FY 2005 cuts that are putting pressure on agency supercomputing efforts now.
FCW says the cuts in FY 05 will result in 15 to 20 layoffs of NASA Ames’ supercomputing staff and 20 to 25 layoffs in its robotics staff (currently at 70 and 100, respectively). Buyout packages are being offered.

Chris Knight, vice president for negotiations at Ames Federal Employees Union and a Computational Sciences Division employee, said the buyouts apply to all IT workers except three in visualization and robotics. But the amounts will not be enough to convince most people to leave, he said.
“A lot of the research centers are being basically bled dry,” Knight said.

Read the whole article.

 
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Concerns about the Status of the Federal Effort in IT R&D

On March 25, 2005, In CRA, Funding, Policy, By Peter Harsha

For the last several years, CRA has provided an analysis of computing research in the Administration’s budget request for AAAS’ annual look at R&D in the President’s Budget Request. The book containing the CRA analysis won’t be available until April, but I thought I’d post some of the core of that effort here. After the jump (the “Continue Reading…” link below) you’ll find CRA’s look at the current policy environment — why we’re concerned about the significantly changed landscape for federal IT R&D funding, including an examination of DARPA’s diminished role and NSF’s enhanced one. When the book is released, I’ll post a link to it as well. CRA’s chapter is just one of 26 or so focused on just about every aspect of the overall R&D portfolio.

(more…)

 
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DOE/IBM’s Blue Gene Nearly Doubles its Speed Record

On March 25, 2005, In R&D in the Press, Research, By Peter Harsha

BBC coverage of the jump to 135.5 teraflops.
ZDNet has more.
The feat won’t show up on the current Top500.org list until they release the next revision of the list, which I think will be in May (the last was released in November at the Supercomputing 2004 conference in Pittsburgh, and it seems to be issued at six month intervals).
Update: John West, Director of the ERDC MSRC — one of four DOD HPC program centers — e-mails with a helpful clarification:

Top500 lists are published twice a year: in June and in November. The November list is announced at the annual Supercomputing series of conferences (www.supercomp.org), which is probably part of the reason for its not-quite-six-months timing.

He also notes that the LINPACK score (upon which the Top500 list is based) isn’t the best way to assess a supercomputer’s relative benefit to a discipline, despite it’s popularity — something I probably should have noted in my post.
In my defense, as limited as the LINPACK score is in what it says about a particular machine, it is the one number most people out here (certainly in the policy world) cling to when trying to understand progress in supercomputing. Though it wasn’t the message we sought to convey, the fact that the Japanese Earth Simulator was X teraflops faster than our “best” machine certainly focused the mind of a lot of policymakers in Congress last year, for better or worse. In talking about high-end computing with them, we certainly tried not to emphasize that measure; rather, we tried to talk about the importance of a sustained research effort on a diverse set of approaches to enable progress on a wide range of different problems.
John also notes that there are some interesting efforts to develop a new metric coming out of DARPA’s HPCS program, but those measures are likely to be a bit more complex — almost certainly spelling doom for their adoption over the “one number fits all” of the LINPACK.

 
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