Plug into the electrical grid and you can make toast with electricity from any number of far-flung generating plants. Plug into the National Science Foundation's TeraGrid and you will be able to perform trillions of calculations per second with equally far-flung computers.

Computer scientists have now taken the first steps to tie the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center's LeMieux computer into the nascent network, establishing a high-speed, fiber-optic link between the computer in Monroeville and the TeraGrid's eastern hub in Chicago.

Though LeMieux alone is capable of performing up to six trillion calculations per second -- or six "teraflops," as a computer engineer would say -- the goal of the TeraGrid is to provide users with the ability to perform up to 20 teraflops without worrying about which computer or combination of computers is doing the work.

"Our goal is to make this as seamless as we possibly can," said Derek Simmel, grid computing specialist at the Pittsburgh center.

Few people need such computer power at their fingertips, but scientists who are trying to use computers to simulate earthquakes, predict the path of tornadoes or mimic the cascade of biochemical events that cause a nerve ending to fire increasingly are demanding computational power that few, if any, existing computers can provide by themselves.

A group of "friendly users" -- scientists who are adept at using supercomputers -- are now beginning to test the new grid and to help work out some of the kinks. In return, they are not being charged for their computing time.

The NSF launched the TeraGrid two years ago with a $53 million plan to link computers at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois with the San Diego Supercomputer Center and the California Institute of Technology.

Last October, however, the NSF approved another $35 million to expand the TeraGrid even further by tying in Pittsburgh's LeMieux, the nickname for what is officially the Terascale Computing System.

Though the TeraGrid itself is still being developed, the addition of LeMieux adds an extra layer of complication. All of the computers at the original four sites use Intel hardware and the same Linux operating system. LeMieux is built with Hewlett-Packard components and runs a Unix operating system.

Simmel heads up a TeraGrid working group that is developing the software necessary to make LeMieux and the other computers "play in the same sandbox as everyone else."

Wendy Huntoon, assistant director for networking at the Pittsburgh center, said developing methods for interoperability will become a bigger issue as the TeraGrid continues to expand. The NSF this summer requested proposals from other centers interested in tying their computers into the grid and is expected to announce its selections soon.

The Pittsburgh center has contracted with a new consortium of academic centers, National Lambda Rail, to provide the fiber-optic link with the TeraGrid's Chicago hub. The link now consists of a single pipeline capable of transmitting 10 billion bits of data per second between the two centers.

Once the link is operating efficiently, two more will be added, enabling data to be transmitted at 30 billion bits a second. That's fast enough to download the complete works of William Shakespeare 750 times every second.