The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency says national security and industry by the end of the decade will need supercomputers that operate a thousand times faster than today's computers.

That means those supercomputers will be able to perform quadrillions of calculations each second. But what researchers really want is a solution to their problems; if it takes months or years to develop software to take advantage of that brute computing force, the productivity of those computers will be limited.

So the University of Pittsburgh and the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center are developing a software tool, called the Standardized User Monitoring Suite, or SUMS, that will quantify and analyze the programming time required for next-generation supercomputing.

IBM, which received $53 million from DARPA as one of three contractors on it High-Productivity Computing Systems initiative, is providing $900,000 for the three-year Pittsburgh effort, which will be led by Rami Melhem, chairman of Pitt's computer science department.

The new tool will enable computer designers to weigh all of the costs of a system, including the human costs, before committing to a particular system architecture, Melhem said.