Revamping DARPA Is Vital to Preserving the U.S. Lead in IT
Government-funded basic and applied research at U.S. universities has given rise to multi-billion-dollar industry after multi-billion-dollar industry. It has been one of the pillars of the U.S. high tech sector. But at least in information technology, the model has been seriously weakened by changes that the administration of George W. Bush instituted at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which in the prior 30 years had bankrolled some of the most important advances in IT.
Specifically, DARPA under Bush drastically reduced the role of universities in IT research projects it funded and shifted both power and money to companies. If the old DARPA model is not restored, the U.S. lead in IT — especially in software — could be lost.
In the IT field, there historically were two basic models for funding academic research: the traditional peer-review model, where everyone writes a lot of proposals and your peers evaluate them and select the ones worth funding, and the DARPA model, where scientists would pitch ideas for high-risk, high-reward projects to the agency’s program directors, who are often accomplished scientists and engineers. The latter were swing-for-the-fences projects. Those that were successful led to billion-dollar industries.
The Bush administration put a person in charge of DARPA — Tony Tether — who had an unusual view of the job. Apparently, Tether thought we could shortcut the time between invention and commercial products by giving the lead role in projects to companies.
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This was a dramatic departure. Academic scientists, who previously had been driving the research agenda for DARPA-funded projects, essentially became consultants to the companies and the proportion of the DARPA funds allocated to universities for IT research was slashed. The government doesn’t release the figures, but my guess is that the universities’ share dropped from something like 40% to about 10%.
The problem is you can’t predict in advance which company is going to want to use the new inventions that a project ends up producing. Moreover, the leading companies in an area often don’t want to get involved in government funding. So you often end up working with second-rate companies.
In addition, Tether instituted 12- to 18-month milestones for DARPA-funded programs. If you didn’t make them, he would cancel not just one person’s contract but the whole program. The idea that you can decide the success of research in 12 to 18 months is absurd. That may be fine for product-development efforts, but research is not a straight-forward path to an easily-hit target. The previous approach — betting on academic scientists with visions of game-changing advances and giving them funding for three to five years — made much more sense.
Tether’s measures disengaged some of the best minds in the country from working on the problems that could help the Department of Defense and the information technology industry. He also seemed to have a bias against software projects, which has historically been one of the strongest parts of the American IT industry as well as being one of the strengths of academic research.
The result: Not much progress has been made in solving some of the biggest IT problems confronting us. One worth singling out in particular is developing technology so software can run on multi-core, or parallel, processors. Figuring out how you can make important programs go faster and how to add new features to it when you’re using 10 processors instead of one is a very hard problem to solve — the kind that if somebody in another country figures out how to solve it, the software center of the universe could move from the United States to someplace else.
Before Tether came in, a few of us successfully pitched a project to tackle that challenge. But during the Tether years, the vast majority of DARPA’s money for the project went to IBM, Sun, and Cray Research. I don’t know how many tens or hundreds of millions of dollars DARPA gave to these companies, but whatever research they did has had very little impact on solving one of the biggest problems facing computer science.
The shift to parallel processing levels the playing field in software because nobody has a huge head start. Both China and India both recognize that it represents an opportunity to take the lead in software, and they are investing accordingly. If the leading academic minds in the U.S. had been working hard on this problem for the last eight years and had made great progress, the U.S. lead in software would be much more secure.
Early indications are that DARPA’s new director, Regina Dugan, will return to the path that DARPA employed in its heyday, which led to technologies and inventions that DARPA still brags about on its website.
There’s a lot riding on which path DARPA follows.
David A. Patterson is the Pardee Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley. He was a leader of the RISC project, which allowed computers to run faster; the Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks project, which made possible fast and dependable storage systems; and the Network of Workstations project, which led to cluster computing. Each of these advances led to billion-dollar industries, and all had DARPA funding.
Revamping DARPA Is Vital to Preserving the U.S. Lead in IT
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