Gunning For Speed.

The article discusses Japanese and United States companies and supercomputers. For years, some U.S. supercomputing gurus had been warning that Washington's support of high-performance computing was too narrowly focused on the needs of the Pentagon's nuclear-weapons programs. Even acknowledging the U.S. strength in software, they warned that scientific research was being hobbled because U.S. supers were not designed to solve the really tough issues facing civilian scientists and engineers. On May 12, Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham laid out a comeback plan. Tennessee's Oak Ridge National Laboratory will establish a new supercomputing center for open science and engineering. It will consist of two or three monster computers from Cray Inc. that will dwarf even the Earth Simulator.