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September 10, 2019
View Full Text: FY2020-NITRD-Supplement.pdf
Information technologies (IT) - including networking, computing, and software - comprise the most broadly transformative suite of technologies ever invented. American innovations in these fields since the late 1960s have led the world into a new technological era and opened countless practical capabilities and opportunities on which the security and prosperity of the United States today depend. Also vital to the Nation’s prosperity and security are IT advancements that mitigate potential risks posed by adversarial breaches of the country’s increasingly interwoven IT-based operations.
As IT capabilities and applications began to advance vigorously in the 1980s, the U.S. Congress recognized the urgency of coordinating federally funded networking and information technology research and development (R&D) to effectively channel public investments in these technologies. Congress established the Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) Program in the High-Performance Computing Act of 1991 and has reauthorized it three times, most recently in 2017 by the American Innovation and Competitiveness Act. The NITRD Program’s charge is to help coordinate R&D by Federal agencies to efficiently identify, develop, and transition into practical use the advanced networking and IT capabilities needed by the Federal Government and the Nation.
The NITRD Program currently coordinates the IT R&D activities of 24 Federal agency members and over 45 other participating agencies with program interests and activities in IT R&D. The Program is managed by the NITRD Subcommittee of the National Science and Technology Council’s Committee on Science and Technology Enterprise, with day-to-day support from its National Coordination Office (NCO). As required by legislation, NITRD and NCO must annually compile and send to Congress a Supplement to the President’s Budget that provides the NITRD-relevant R&D budgets requested by member agencies and that details key agency R&D programs and coordination activities.
The President and Congress continue to recognize the seminal value to the security and prosperity of the United States of leading the world in IT innovations and applications. The FY2020 NITRD R&D Budget focuses on R&D investment and coordination in pivotal IT-related technologies that support the leading industries of the future - a core science and technology (S&T) investment focus of the Administration. It defines these industries of the future and their associated technologies as artificial intelligence (AI), advanced manufacturing, quantum information science (QIS), and fifth-generation (5G) wireless communications. All of these have significant IT components that relate directly to the NITRD Program’s R&D coordination mission. American success in these trailblazing fields will rely on both basic and applications-driven research; ongoing support for the R&D infrastructure; public-private R&D partnerships (PPPs) across the U.S. innovation ecosystem; and effective education of the American public and workers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields.
NITRD Interagency Working Groups (IWGs) and their participating agencies’ Program Component Area (PCA) investments work directly and indirectly to support the Administration’s priority to advance IT technologies into practical use in the cutting-edge industries of the future.
In response to Executive Order 13859, "Maintaining American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence," and in support of The National Artificial Intelligence Research and Development Strategic Plan: 2019 Update, this NITRD Budget Supplement reports for the first time a summary of Federal investments in AI (except for DoD and DARPA investment levels, which were not available). Since artificial intelligence as a topic intersects with multiple PCAs, NITRD worked with the Federal agencies to establish a new process for accurately accounting for these AI investments. The FY2020 request sets a baseline going forward for reporting and tracking AI R&D investments, consistent with the AI Executive Order…
View Full Text: FY2020-NITRD-Supplement.pdf
September 10, 2019
View Full Text: FY2020-Cybersecurity-RD-Roadmap.pdf
This document provides FY2020 implementation details for the 2016 Federal Cybersecurity Research and Development Strategic Plan, developed by the Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) Program’s Cyber Security and Information Assurance (CSIA) Interagency Working Group (IWG). This Strategic Plan Implementation Roadmap is provided per statutory requirement for public provision of this information pursuant to the Cybersecurity Enhancement Act of 2014, Public Law 113-274, Section 201(a)(2)(D), Implementation Roadmap, and under direction from the NITRD Subcommittee of the National Science and Technology Council Committee on Science and Technology Enterprise. This document accompanies the NITRD Supplement to the President’s FY2020 Budget.
Agencies participating in the CSIA IWG report their research and development (R&D) programs in the Cyber Security and Privacy Program Component Area in alignment with the research objectives of the Federal Cybersecurity Research and Development Strategic Plan. The four strategic defensive elements of the strategic plan consist of Deter, Protect, Detect, and Adapt, as defined below:
- Deter: The ability to efficiently discourage malicious cyber activities by measuring and increasing the costs to adversaries who carry out such activities, diminishing their spoils, and increasing risks and uncertainty of consequences for cyber attacks.
- Protect: The ability of components, systems, users, and critical infrastructure to efficiently resist malicious cyber activities and to ensure confidentiality, integrity, availability, and accountability.
- Detect: The ability to efficiently detect, and even anticipate, adversary decisions and activities, given that perfect security is not possible and systems should be assumed to be vulnerable to malicious cyber activities.
- Adapt: The ability of defenders, defenses, and infrastructure to dynamically adapt to malicious cyber activities by efficiently reacting to disruption, recovering from damage, maintaining operations while completing restoration, and adjusting to be able to thwart similar future activity.
The FY2020 Implementation Roadmap, which accompanies the NITRD Supplement to the President’s FY2020 Budget, maps the Federal agency programs across these four areas.
View Full Text: FY2020-Cybersecurity-RD-Roadmap.pdf
To learn more about the Cyber Security and Information Assurance (CSIA) Interagency Working Group (IWG) please visit CSIA IWG home page
September 9, 2019
View Full Text: Convergence-HPC-BD-ML-JointWSreport-2019.pdf
The high performance computing (HPC) and big data (BD) communities are evolving in response to changing user needs and technological landscapes. Researchers are increasingly using machine learning (ML) not only for data analytics but also for modeling and simulation; science-based simulations are increasingly relying on embedded ML models not only to interpret results from massive data outputs but also to steer computations. Science-based models are being combined with data-driven models to represent complex systems and phenomena. There also is an increasing need for real-time data analytics, which requires large-scale computations to be performed closer to the data and data infrastructures, to adapt to HPC-like modes of operation. These new use cases create a vital need for HPC and BD systems to deal with simulations and data analytics in a more unified fashion.
To explore this need, the NITRD Big Data and High-End Computing Interagency Working Groups held a workshop, The Convergence of High-Performance Computing, Big Data, and Machine Learning, on October 29-30, 2018, in Bethesda, Maryland. The purposes of the workshop were to bring together representatives from the public, private, and academic sectors to share their knowledge and insights on integrating HPC, BD, and ML systems and approaches and to identify key research challenges and opportunities. The 58 workshop participants represented a balanced cross-section of stakeholders involved in or impacted by this area of research. Additional workshop information, including a webcast, is available at https://www.nitrd.gov/nitrdgroups/index.php?title=HPC-BD-Convergence.
From the presentations and discussions, a vision emerged of a rich computational ecosystem consisting of heterogeneous combinations of edge, cloud, and high performance computing systems. This ecosystem would be flexible and be able to receive data from a variety of sources such as scientific and medical instruments, sensor networks, and security and infrastructure monitoring systems. It would have edge Internet of Things devices that would extract important features and convert data into forms suitable for ingesting and storing in the cloud. Large-scale data analytics would run in the cloud, combining ingested data with stored databases. HPC systems would perform more computationally intensive forms of analysis and optimization, as well as run simulations for predictive modeling.
Such a rich computing environment could provide capabilities well beyond those of today’s isolated systems. For biomedical and clinical research and healthcare, it would enable the use of clinical, laboratory, and even molecular data for patients and for researchers. Data sources could include smart health applications where patient outcomes are connected to an evidence-based computed model, thereby putting data as a “digital first” asset in the healthcare system. The computing environment would allow scientific and medical researchers to solve problems with many degrees of freedom in ways that allow data to inform models and simulations to build better models.
Achieving this vision of a rich computing ecosystem will require new capabilities in hardware (computing, network, and storage); management modes of operation; and software. Providing true convergence among current and future computing environments presents many technical and organization challenges, but it could provide capabilities in scientific research, national security, healthcare, and industry well beyond what is possible today.
View Full Text: Convergence-HPC-BD-ML-JointWSreport-2019.pdf
September 9, 2019
View Full Text: FutureComputing-COI-MeetingReadout-2019.pdf
The Future Computing (FC) Community of Interest (CoI) meeting on August 5–6, 2019, explored the evolving computing landscape to inform agencies about potential opportunities as well as gaps in the Nation’s future computing objectives. The meeting focused on where computing will be in the next decade and beyond while also looking at emerging and future applications. It considered the need for new software concepts and approaches to effectively capitalize on new hardware architectures and paradigms. The long period of sustained growth in computing power over the last five decades, characterized by Moore’s Law and Dennard Scaling, is expected to end over the next decade. The continued improvement in computing performance will now require moving to new modalities and new means of cooperation and partnership for the benefit of the Nation.
The FC-CoI meeting was held at the offices of the Federal Networking and Information Technology Research and Development Program in Washington, D.C. The meeting brought together key members of industry, academia, and the Federal Government over a two-day period to discuss the future of computing. The meeting had been advertised in the Federal Register to encourage broad participation from the advanced computing community. More detail about the meeting is available at https://www.nitrd.gov/nitrdgroups/index.php?title=FC-COI-2019.
View Full Text: FutureComputing-COI-MeetingReadout-2019.pdf
