IP: NSF CHIEF HAILS CYBERSPACE RESEARCH AS NEW "MANHATTAN PROJECT"

[Dave Farber <farber@cis.upenn.edu>]

Referring to the recent recommendation of a presidential advisory commission 
that the National Science Foundation be made lead agency in a $1 billion, 
5-year research effort to solve hardware, software, and data transfer 
issues, newly installed NSF director Rita Rossi Colwell says, "I think the 
nation needs to make this investment. I see this in a way as the social 
equivalent of the Manhattan Project... The NSFnet evolved into the Internet 
and was spun out into industry; there's a tremendous amount of basic 
research that's been done and is being done" to prepare the way for the 
high-performance computational capabilities that will be required in the 
decades ahead. (Washington Post 1 Sep 98)