 
|
|||||||||
              
|
Editorial -- Super-saver Making the effort to keep Pittsburgh's primo computer Monday, March 09, 1998
For 12 years the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center has been a crown jewel of regional high technology. But a change last year in the National Science Board's funding of such facilities put the future of Pittsburgh's center in doubt.
The science board, which had been spreading $65 million annually among four different supercomputing centers, decided to begin targeting its funds to only two sites: San Diego and Champaign-Urbana, Ill.
That left the Pittsburgh center -- a collaboration of Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Pittsburgh and Westinghouse Electric Corp. -- with a $15 million hole in its $30 million budget.
Supercomputers are the world's most powerful thinking machines. They do calculations for academic or corporate researchers on real-world problems hundreds of times faster than conventional computers.
The Pittsburgh center has been fortunate to attract and employ the latest models from Cray Research Inc. Only a year ago, the company delivered to the center the most powerful Cray in the world, the T3E; now the Pittsburgh unit is capable of performing 384 billion computations every second.
Despite the calculating muscle of the Cray machines and the scientific talent that has gravitated to the Pittsburgh center, the facility lacks a long-term financial plan.
With the help of U.S. Rep. Mike Doyle, a member of the House Science Committee, the Energy Department last month awarded a $4.5 million contract to the Pittsburgh center to help researchers run simulations that will aid the government in monitoring the safety of aging nuclear stockpiles.
Although the Swissvale Democrat said the money would prevent the center's shutdown, Energy officials have been careful to note that the contract is for one year only. That being the case, plus the fact that Energy's $4.5 million doesn't replace the National Science Foundation's $15 million, there is still plenty of work to do.
We're glad to see Rep. Doyle's work pay off for the center, but more efforts are needed by the two universities, the Pittsburgh High Technology Council, the Pittsburgh Regional Alliance and Gov. Ridge to find the financial support, public or private, to keep this scientific showpiece open.
Pittsburgh and, to a certain extent, Pennsylvania have invested much of their image and future in an expansion of high technology. To lose the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center now would be an all-too-noticeable step in the wrong direction.
|
||||||||
