Thursday, December 17, 2009

That supercomputer budget cut, in full, in brief

As I predicted not so long ago, the proposed mothballing of the Japanese petaflop computer has been reversed.

I suppose the initial proposals, outrageous as they were, could be viewed as a sort of kite-flying exercise in order to make the final cut seem relatively moderate. It's still a hefty 15% though, although Japanese budgetary techniques seem to always find money from somewhere when it is really needed. I think it's a safe bet that our sister institute IFREE will not suffer a cut anywhere the originally proposed 50%, which as has been noted, would pretty much destroy it as a viable lab as well as damaging Japan's credibility as an international collaborator.

Meanwhile we've been asked by our bosses to boost our budget requests to the maximum extent possible, presumably so that after any overall cut, we'll still have as much as we really needed in the first place.

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