Inside Iowa State
Dec. 1, 1995


                   Power in Numbers

by Skip Derra
During the annual Supercomputing '95 conference in San Diego 
this month, 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. Linking supercomputers 
from government agencies and industries, the scientists will 
try to push computing power into the ionosphere.

Computational scientists from the Ames Lab are playing an 
important role by measuring the overall system performance 
with their award-winning HINT (Hier-archical INTegration) 
performance analysis software. At the same time, David 
Deavan, an Ames Lab postdoctoral researcher, will use the 
meta-computer to study the grain boundaries of metallic 
systems using a new computer algorithm.

"Computing on this scale has never been tried before," said 
Steve Elbert, an Ames Lab computational scientist. "HINT is 
the only way to objectively measure the total power of this 
extended super-computer."
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University Relations
Iowa State University