The article in HBR is so remarkably biased and opinionated, that it borders on inflamatory. No numbers. No data. It uses the tired common approach of marrying unpoplular political figures to the problem to rally people behind it. Academics have not lost DARPA funding to companies.

Now it is well understood that DARPA has emphasized near-term “research” over more exotic, distant goals. However, we are also at a time where tremendous gains in our understanding of new science and our ability to engineer solutions have made rapid breakthroughs possible.

Read over the current set of BAAs and see for yourself that the portfolio includes.

The home runs DARPA hit were not understood as homeruns in the first few years, only in hindsight. Yet all of the criticism of Tether seems to neglect that fact.

What surprises me most are the claims that DARPA dropped the ball on parallel computing, especially in light of multicore processors. Really? All of the readers should take time to review what DARPA was funding five years ago and then try to make the same claim.

Just look at how fast industry is moving to address this parallel compute problem. Why should DARPA even bother paying for this now? The need is well understood and actively being pursued today. Now I am all for spending more in bring post-exascale work closer to today. This is the scale of project DARPA should fund. Not projects that address todays difficulty in programming parallel.

This article was written to gain support for increased funding.

I am disappointed.

Thanks for raising this topic. We can only hope things will change for the better.

David’s reference to the DARPA HPCS program is very strategic in its nature. DARPA is currently working on the follow on for the HPCS program, deemed the Ubiquitous High Performance Computing program, or UHPC. Indeed, Cray, Sun and IBM were big players in its predecessor. However, each prime contracting vendor had a myriad of national labs and university partners for the program. With the exception of IBM Deep Computing, *most* vendors employ engineers skilled in the craft of taking great ideas and turning them into supportable products. They don’t generally employ a large workforce of engineers doing pure R&D. Enter academia. In order for these DARPA programs to be wholly successful, the vendor primes *need* the wild thinking often found in universities and national labs.