The National Science Foundation has hit up Congress for $6.43 billion in funding for fiscal year 2008, up $409 million over its fiscal year 2007 request.
The NSF is counting on the Bush administration delivering on the American Competitive Initiative introduced last year, under which a commitment was made to double over the next 10 years investments in NSF and other such research programs.
Among the areas where the NSF funding would come into play would cyber-enabled discovery and innovation, which involves using petascale computers operating at a quadrillion calculations per second to plow through massive data flows and databases.
The NSF is seeking close to $1 billion — about a $90 million increase — to fund its Networking and Information Technology R&D initiative. This involves high-end computing infrastructure and applications, large-scale networking and social, economic and workforce ramifications of advanced networks.
Another objective is to establish the research.gov Web portal for grantees seeking funding.
Read the NSF budget proposal here.
