The Iowa Stater, Dec. 15

The Iowa Stater
Dec. 15, 1995

Strength in numbers
Scientists armed with high speed data links and access to the nation's most powerful supercomputers will try to create the mother of all computers during the annual Supercomputing '95 conference in San Diego this month. Linking supercomputers from government agencies like NASA and the Department of Energy, and industry types like IBM and Silicon Graphics, the scientists will try to push computing power into the ionosphere.
Computational scientists from Iowa State's Ames Laboratory are playing an important role by measuring the overall system performance with their award-winning HINTĒ analysis software. While there are science projects scheduled to be run on the monster number cruncher, the effort is also a bit more basic than trying to mathematically determine the meaning of life.
"This has never been tried before, so we want to see if it can be done, and what happens when it's done," says Steve Elbert, an Ames Lab computational scientist.

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