Fast and Smart

(4 of 8)
The military-intelligence connection is nothing new for supercomputer manufacturers. One of the first Crays to come off the assembly line in 1976 was shipped to the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where it made short work of the mind-boggling mathematical equations required to design hydrogen bombs. Another early Cray without doubt was delivered to the National Security Agency in Fort Meade, Md., where it would have been put to work cracking military codes and sorting through the intelligence data that flood into the agency every day.

What is new is the rapidly growing appetite for supercomputer power in the private sector. In a classic case of a technology developed for a few specialized purposes finding application in all sorts of unexpected areas, supercomputing has spread from one industry to another like a benevolent virus. Semiconductor manufacturers use supercomputers to design ways to squeeze more transistors into a square-centimeter chip of silicon. Financial advisers use them to devise investment strategies of dizzying complexity. Biochemists need them to predict which molecules are worth testing as new medicines. Engineers rely on them to design new cars, jet engines, light bulbs, sailboats, refrigerators and artificial limbs.

No one benefits more from supercomputing than research scientists. The National Science Foundation belatedly recognized that fact in 1985, when it committed itself to spending more than $200 million to create supercomputer centers at five selected sites, plus the electronic links to connect the machines to dozens of universities and research labs. Today some 6,000 scientists at more than 200 institutions have access to the NSF centers. This availability has sparked a burst of scientific productivity in fields ranging from mathematics to fluid dynamics. Says Ron Bailey, chief of the Numerical Aerodynamic Simulation program at the NASA Ames Research Center: "Supercomputers are as significant to pioneering research today as calculus was to Newton."

Supercomputers are giving scientists unprecedented access to hidden worlds both large and small. Using the prodigious power of the Cray at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, Researchers Mark Ellisman and Stephen Young are studying a pair of noodle-like structures in the brains of Alzheimer's victims that scientists think may be a cause of premature dementia. Northwestern University Professor Arthur Freeman used a Cray-2 to produce a stunning portrait of the atomic structure of a new superconductor that carries an electric current freely at -283 degrees F. The Cray X-MP at the University of Illinois has produced a dazzling array of colorful animations, from the roiling birth of a tornado to the supersonic fountains that spew forth from black holes at the centers of galaxies. Says Nobel Physicist Kenneth Wilson of Cornell University: "An astronomer with a telescope can observe the universe over a period of 50 years. But an astrophysicist with a supercomputer can 'see' billions of years into the past and the future."