Many of the large problems that confront society are multidisciplinary and high-performance computing can contribute in essential ways to their solution, Malvin H. Kalos, director of the Cornell Theory Center, told a congressional panel last week.

These problems, Kalos said, cross the boundaries of any one science and must be approached through systematic connections that supercomputing allows.

"Issues of the environment and medicine, to cite only two, involve many sciences -- chemistry, physics, engineering, fluid flow, biology and materials," Kalos testified. "Bringing the knowledge from these fields together to make quantitative predictions about the effects of some technological proposal would be utterly impossible without the use of high-performance computational modeling, the indispensable natural language of quantitative multidisciplinary research."

Kalos testified March 19 before the Subcommittee on Basic Research of the U.S. House Science Committee, which held hearings on the past and future of the four national supercomputing centers and National Science Foundation (NSF) support of those centers. The subcommittee is chaired by U.S. Rep. Steven Schiff (R-N.M.), and includes Rep. Sherwood Boehlert (R-N.Y.).

Also testifying were the directors of the three other national centers, at Champaign-Urbana, Ill., San Diego and Pittsburgh; Paul Young, NSF assistant director for computer and information science and engineering; Ed Hayes, chair of the committee that made recommendations for a new NSF program; and users of supercomputing.

The NSF is proposing a new program to replace the current one, which began in 1985. The new program, Partnerships for Advanced Computational Infrastructure, builds on and replaces the current program and offers flexibility and continued excellence to meet the nation's need for high-end computing, according to the NSF. But it also requires the four current NSF-supported centers to enter a competition in which only three will survive.

"Computational science is now also an essential tool in experimental science," Kalos told the oversight panel. "The most advanced scientific instruments, optical and radio telescopes, particle accelerators and computers themselves are studied, designed, optimized and verified with computer simulation. Data collection is usually automated, and the reduction to comprehensible data sets or conceptual models may involve enormous computations.

"Now the entire scientific and engineering community of the country has the opportunity to exploit the new tools of computational science," he said.

Kalos said the new high-performance computers require a "major retooling of software and algorithms," which the Cornell Theory Center is equipped to provide. In response to the new NSF program, the Theory Center is creating a National Alliance for Advanced Computational Infrastructure.

This alliance will comprise a new network of cooperating organizations around the nation that are of "world-class stature in scalable computing; in related technologies, such as virtual reality and computer graphics; in all areas of computer science that relate to parallel computing; in computational mathematics; in forefront applications," he said.

Kalos, a physicist and vice chairman of the Division of Computational Physics of the American Physical Society, gave examples of the broad range of science that is being done at the Theory Center, including researchers at UCLA studying turbulence in complex plasmas; Penn State's identification, using the Arecibo Observatory, of the first planets outside the solar system; MIT's research into the formation of galaxies, and Brown University's efforts at studying turbulent flow.

Cornell's partnership with IBM also is key to the national interest, Kalos said. "We have also made a singularly important contribution to the national scientific effort by the depth and quality of our partnership with IBM. Through this partnership, we rekindled IBM's interest in high-end technical computing and thereby helped to bring their superb technology to the service of science and engineering. As is often the case, the technical computing world has led the way in bringing about new technologies for the broader commercial arena; we believe that IBM's success will help assure a future for computational science."

Kalos concluded: "We share a commitment to the idea that a partnership of the kind that we envision is a logical next step for the Cornell Theory Center. It will transform our program into something quite new, something that will serve the best interests of the community devoted to computational science and the broader community of research in basic science."