When NAS was a drawing-board concept in the late 1970s, the idea of supercomputing in a production environment was still very new. Supercomputers were rare, as was the expertise required to use them effectively. When NAS opened its doors in the mid-'80s, one of its major goals was to make the use of supercomputers in aeronautics routine by making them readily available to scientists.

 We accomplished this goal by pioneering many of the technologies and techniques that have become standards for integrating supercomputers into a production environment: networking to other computers with common operating systems, using scientific workstations to visualize datasets, and developing transparent methods of handling data transfer and storage.

By the early '90s, NAS had become the standard by which other supercomputer centers were evaluated. In fact many other successful supercomputer centers around the world adopted the architectural and operational paradigms that were first implemented here.

A few highlights from our first 15 years:

In the few years since supercomputer use has become routine for researchers, the high-speed computing landscape has changed dramatically. In 1999, the power of the multimillion-dollar supercomputers of the 1980s is available in workstations costing just thousands of dollars. At the same time, advances in information processing, networking, and data storage have removed many of the physical and geographical barriers to sharing computing resources that existed just a short while ago.

Recognizing this world-wide change, we understand that the "supercomputer center" paradigm we once pioneered has fulfilled its role in the evolution of high-speed computing—and is rapidly becoming as impractical as the large vector computers it was once centered around. So, in our ongoing commitment to providing NASA missions and projects with unique and powerful computing resources, we are leading NASA's effort to create a new paradigm for high-speed computing in the next century—the Information Power Grid.