Abstract

The Federal agencies that participate in the Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) Program work together to maintain U.S. leadership in advanced computing, networking, and information technologies. NITRD results help these agencies fulfill their 21st century missions. This Supplement to the President's FY 2003 Budget summarizes the major FY 2002 NITRD accomplishments and FY 2003 plans and includes a special section on how IT R&D products played key roles in the response to the September 11, 2001, attack on New York's World Trade Center. The report highlights promising high-end computing technologies to explore the frontiers of complexity; dynamic, flexible, secure networks of the future; R&D on IT to support human needs and goals; technologies to build knowledge from data; reliable, secure, and safe software and systems; improved cost-effective software through science and engineering; and enhancing IT education and training for the high-skills world.

Cover Design and Imagery

The cover design and graphics are by National Science Foundation (NSF) designer-illustrator James J. Caras.

Illustration note: The light areas of the continents on the world map show concentrations of nighttime electrical illumination around the globe. The extraordinary composite view from which the cover map was made was developed by scientists Marc Imhoff of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) and Christopher Elvidge of NOAA's National Geophysical Data Center using visible radiance data gathered over nine months by the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program sensors; the visualization was created by Craig Mayhew and Robert Simmon of GSFC. See http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/image/0011/earthlights_dmsp_big.jpg

Front cover images, left to right: 3-D physical model of bacillus anthracis (anthrax) fabricated by computer-controlled prototyping equipment using data from the NITRD agencies' (DOE, NIH, NIST, and NSF) collaborative online Protein Data Bank, an international repository of 3-D macromolecular structure data; the investigator was Michael Bailey of the San Diego Supercomputer Center. High-resolution simulation from NOAA'S Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at Princeton University shows vase-like motion of polar air from 14 to 42 kilometers above the earth's surface; this circulation pattern influences ozone concentrations across the lower latitudes. Screen shot from 3-D model of a particle (purple dot) moving through a fluid (green mesh), generated using NWGrid and NWPhys software developed by DOE's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory; these advanced software tools establish hybrid mesh topologies for visualizing and solving computational physics problems - such as thermal diffusion characteristics, hydrodynamic and multimaterial flows, and fluid flows through geological formations - on distributed parallel computing systems. NASA visualization shows five interatomic surfaces, or "zero-flux" surfaces, in the gradient vector field of the electronic charge density for the ethylene molecule (C₂H₄); these surfaces partition space into basins of attraction, constituting "atoms in molecules" as advanced in the quantum theory of Richard Bader, and are precisely analogous to potential flow separation surfaces in aerodynamics.

Back cover image: Visualization of the directory tree of an Internet node, created with Walrus software tool developed by Young Hyun of the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA) with support from DARPA and NSF. From user-supplied data and specifications, Walrus employs 3-D hyperbolic geometry to turn graph data into a multicolor interactive graphic display with a fisheye distortion. Within the fisheye sphere, details are magnified at the center and reduced in size to zero at the periphery; the viewer can navigate the graph to examine every part of the data set at the highest level of detail. Tools such as Walrus enable network analysts to "see" the architectures of network connectivity and to better understand the complexity of Internet topology. CAIDA recently used Walrus to create a visualization of the global spread of the Code Red computer worm in July 2001 http://www.caida.org/tools/visualization/walrus/examples/codered/). Image courtesy of CAIDA.