DOE budgets for cybersecurity, exascale, quantum programs
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The $30.6 billion budget proposal would invest almost $500 million for energy infrastructure security and $636 million to meet exascale goals.
While President Donald Trump's 2019 budget proposal cuts funding for the Department of Energy's renewable energy research, it boosts cyber protections for energy infrastructure and substantially increases funding for quantum computing and exascale programs.
The $30.6 billion budget request, which calls for "transformative science and technology innovation," would invest almost $500 million in cybersecurity technologies for energy infrastructure and $395 million specifically for enterprise cybersecurity risk management.
The FY19 proposal would provide another $96 million for electric grid and energy sector cybersecurity research and development, as well as establish a separate account for Cybersecurity, Energy Security, and Emergency Response, according to a Feb.14 statement by Energy Secretary Rick Perry. The separate CESER account, Perry said, would consolidate funding to address the agency's expanded cybersecurity responsibilities.
The budget also prioritizes exascale computing research and development. DOE would invest $636 million in exascale, splitting the money between its Office of Science, which oversees the national research laboratories, and the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) to develop an exascale software ecosystem for mission-critical applications by 2021.
The Office of Science would get $473 million for exascale under the budget, while NNSA would get $163 million. That combined figure is $376 million above the 2017 enacted level for exascale' development.
The department has been pushing to develop exascale capabilities as China accumulates its own. Last June, Perry announced $258 million in funding awards under the agency's Exascale Computing Project, which is part of the agency's PathForward program for high-performance computing development. The ECP awards went to Advanced Micro Devices, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, IBM, Intel and NVIDIA.
The department also seeks to devote $105 million to quantum computing technology to build up U.S.' competency and competiveness.
This article was first posted to FCW, a sibling site to GCN.