Supercomputing, cyberinfrastructure among administration’s highest R&D priorities

The Bush administration has placed supercomputing and cyberinfrastructure among its highest priorities for agency research and development efforts in fiscal 2006. In a memo to agency executives, Office of Management and Budget director Josh Bolten and John Marburger, director of the White House’s Science and Technology Policy Office, asked officials to focus their 2006 budget requests on these two areas. “While the importance of each networking and IT research and development program areas continues, high-end computing and cyberinfrastructure R&D should be given higher relative priority due to the potential of each in furthering progress across a broad range of scientific and technological application areas,” the memo said. “Agency requests should reflect these two program priorities by reallocating funds from low priority efforts.” David Nelson, director of the White House’s National Coordination Office for IT R&D, said although asking agencies to reallocate and prioritize funding is nothing new, it hasn’t been done in a while.

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