The NITRD Program

Leveraging IT Talents and Resources Through Interagency Collaboration

The multiagency Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) Program occupies a unique position in the Federal science and technology research portfolio. There is no other single area of either science or technology whose impacts on government and society are at once so pervasive, so profound, and so critical to the national interest. Information technology is the ultimate interdisciplinary enabler, reaching into many basic and applied sciences for its source materials and producing devices and capabilities with universal applications.

Networks and other information technologies today provide the core infrastructure, platforms, and tools for necessary activities across the whole spectrum of American endeavor - from national defense and national security, to communications, commerce, and industry, to biomedical and scientific research, to health care and education, to agriculture and transportation, to weather forecasting, energy management, environmental protection, and citizen services. The critical components of IT systems and devices combine fundamental and applied knowledge in mathematics, physics, chemical, electrical, and mechanical engineering, and computer science. Tailoring these components to specific application fields - such as aerospace transportation and communication systems, weapons systems, telecommunications networks, biomedical research, large-scale information collection, storage, and management, and the like - requires additionalinterdisciplinary collaboration between the technology builders and users.

Even at the time the Congress called for interagency IT research collaboration in the High-Performance Computing (HPC) Act of 1991 (P.L. 102-194), it was by no means clear that computing and networking technologies would, in only a few years, dramatically transform society. But the bipartisan HPC legislation turned out to be prescient. It established a strong interagency framework for Federal IT research, combining ambitious goals with requirements for interagency cooperation, coordination, and partnerships with academe and industry. The program has grown steadily into a highly productive research enterprise involving all the major Federal science and research agencies and collaborations with virtually all major U.S. research universities and with many companies developing new information technologies and applications.

Over the course of the decade, not just the wisdom but the necessity of interdisciplinary collaboration and coordination in IT research has become more widely recognized, as the complexity and heterogeneity of systems and software continue to spiral upward with the demand for new IT capabilities and protections. In this context, the coordination of Federal IT R&D investments - the Nation's most important source of fundamental IT research - across many agencies and private-sector partnerships powerfully leverages both human talents and mission-related research. This accelerates advances in the underlying technologies - called "enabling" technologies - on which all computing and networking devices and systems are based. The results are general-purpose, broadly useful, and interoperable technologies, tools, and applications that enable Federal deployment of state-of-the-art systems for critical agency missions and spur commercial development and innovation throughout the economy.

The NITRD Program is one of the very few formal interagency research efforts in the U.S. government. It has become a model for success in such a collaborative enterprise. Criteria for participation are outlined in Participation in Federal NITRD Activities.

The NITRD agencies are:

• Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ)
• Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)
• Department of Defense, Office of the Director, Defense Research & Engineering (ODDR&E)
• Department of Energy (DOE) National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA)
• Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science
• Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
• National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)
• National Institutes of Health (NIH)
• National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)
• National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)
• National Security Agency (NSA)
• National Science Foundation (NSF)

The collaborative research agenda of the NITRD agencies is expressed in seven Program Component Areas (PCAs), each of which focuses on particular aspects of IT research. Each PCA has a Coordinating Group made up of agency program managers in the relevant research fields. These groups meet monthly to exchange information and coordinate multiagency Activities in their areas.The PCAs are:

• High End Computing (HEC), which includes both HEC R&D and HEC Infrastructure & Applications (I&A)
• Human Computer Interaction & Information Management (HCI & IM)
• Large Scale Networking (LSN)
• LSN also fields three targeted teams - Joint Engineering Team ( JET), Middleware and Grid Infrastructure Coordination (MAGIC), and Networking Research Team (NRT) - that address specific technical issue areas.These teams include non- Federal members from academe and industry.
• Software Design and Productivity (SDP)
• High Confidence Software and Systems (HCSS)
• Social, Economic, and Workforce Implications of IT and IT Workforce Development (SEW)

Overall coordination of NITRD activities is handled by the Interagency Working Group (IWG) on IT R&D of the National Science and Technology Council. The IWG is made up of representatives from each of the participating agencies and from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), the National Economic Council (NEC), and the National Coordination Office (NCO) for IT R&D. The IWG is co-chaired by NSF's Assistant Director for the Computing and Information Science and Engineering Directorate and the Director of the NCO, which coordinates planning, budget, and assessment activities for the NITRD Program.

Agencies’ NITRD activities are funded through standard budgeting and appropriations measures that involve the participating agencies and departments, OMB, and the Congress and are signed into law by the President. NITRD efforts typically involve multiagency collaboration, with mutual planning and mutual defense of budgets; agencies provide funding and management for their research contributions to the NITRD enterprise.

This Supplement to the President“s Budget for FY 2003 outlines the current activities and plans of the NITRD Program, as required by the HPC Act of 1991.The Supplement describes key roles being played by the NITRD agencies in the war on terrorism and highlights major NITRD research efforts to develop and prototype the next-generation IT component technologies and tools that will power U.S. scientific and economic innovation in the years ahead. The proposed NITRD budget for FY 2003 is $1,889 million, a $59-million increase above the estimated $1,830 million in FY 2002. FY 2002 budget estimates and FY 2003 requests for the NITRD Program, by agency and by PCA, are shown in Agency NITRD Budgets by Program Component Area.

Copies of NCO publications, including this report, information about NITRD activities, and links to participating agency and related Web sites can be found at:

http://www.nitrd.gov/