Harry S. Truman did more than fire General MacArthur. He showed us where the buck stops, and he signed a bill establishing the National Science Foundation. That agency’s 1951 mission statement still applies: “to promote scientific and engineering research and education in the United States.”

What do you get for $4.5 billion in fiscal 2002 from the NSF? An agency that awards $3.5 billion in research grants, builds a computational grid structure available to scientists across the country and does the work of a jillion mathematicians. Its director, Rita Colwell, reports directly to President Bush. Of the nearly 30,000 grant requests the foundation receives each year, about 9,000 are funded, yet few agencies have done more to unravel the mysteries of pure and practical science or offer greater promise.

Socializing the cost of basic research and orphan drug development may not square with Libertarian principle, but can you fathom much shareholder support for billion-dollar investments in scanning other galaxies or chasing invisible forces of “dark matter,” the stuff physicists tell us keeps an expanding universe from slowing down? Or even something simple like 3D renderings of the Orion Nebula, protein distinctions, the origin of the universe, and how it will expire? Imagine your joy reading the 10-Q of a favorite retirement asset announcing the discovery of some new planet. (NSF researchers have found 10 outside our solar system.)

So the work goes. One of seven NSF directorates, computer and information science and engineering is charged with “upholding U.S. leadership in information sciences and contributing to universal, transparent and affordable participation in an information-based society.” That task is organized among five divisions, three of which focus principally on research, and two which combine both infrastructure and research.

The Advanced Computational Infrastructure & Research division is one of these two. And that’s where San Diego comes in, or to be exact, the San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of California San Diego, and the National Center of Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

These two institutions — twice survivors of national competitions and described by SDSC Director Fran Berman as “national treasures” — now share the ACIR “partnering” mission that supports: 1) investigator initiated research by public and private groups in all areas of computer and information science and engineering, and 2) development of the high-speed grid of networked supercomputers, routers and servers that complex research requires. In short, an otherwise unaffordable computational infrastructure performing at teraflop speeds (a trillion calculations per second) will become available to researchers around the nation and eventually the world.

A recent $53 million award will be used to build the Distributed Terascale Facility, a supercluster of state-of-the-art, but off-the-shelf clumps of fast processors working in parallel and networked with existing grids that overlay the Internet. NCSA estimates that clustering of PCs on a high-speed communications system can yield the same computing power as a single-vendor supercomputer for half to a fifth of the cost.

A cluster to be built at the San Diego Supercomputer Center will push the capacity of the system to 13.6 teraflops. Grids permit supercomputer resource pooling of scattered machines, but in this case employ the Linux open-source operating system. This means, writes Paul Wood of The News Gazette, “You’ll never have to wait for Bill Gates to release yet another beta version.” Scheduled for completion in three years, the project has acquired two new development partners, Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago and the California Institute of Technology.

Why is this important aside from the obvious, that speed and capacity produce results in hours rather than years? SDSC Deputy Director Mike Vildibill explains: “Since our inception, SDSC has had a strong relationship with industry both in terms of technology development and its use for research and design. Years ago our primary industrial partners comprised mainly computer manufacturers such as Cray, nCUBE, Thinking Machines, Intel and others interested in making supercomputer systems. Likewise, the majority of our industrial users were those interested in doing large-scale computations.

“We were essentially providing computer ‘cycles’ to them. At the time, only a handful of progressive companies were doing such large scale computation, things like the use of aerodynamics codes for the design of efficient submarine hulls, simulating airflow over a fuselage, or simulating fluid flow through everything from pipes to heart valves. That is, a heavy emphasis on engineering applications with some interest in chemistry.”

During the past four years transition toward data and a wild increase in computational methods by industry has occurred, Vildibill notes, in particular among bio and life sciences.

The use of grid technologies involving data management, data archives, data mining, processing, assimilation, visualization and knowledge discovery will have a huge impact on industry, but raw data is rarely helpful without experts in a given field to make use of it.

“Our vision at SDSC is to make the data management environment, through new grid technology, easy enough to use so that biologists, for example, can go back to doing biology rather than spending their time managing complex IT environments,” says Vildibill.

Research partnering decisions will continue to be made within the framework of PACI (Champaign) and NPACI (San Diego). More than 100 research institutions are now engaged, including 50 within NPACI. Of these, half are San Diego based.

The economic benefits that SDSC brings to San Diego are immense. “Consider, for example, we are a major West Coast telecommunications hub for the academic research community,” Vildibill says. “We (with Champaign) are in process of deploying the world’s most powerful research network that will link Chicago, Los Angeles and San Diego with a 40 gigabit per second network. In terms of economic benefit to the region, this is equivalent to building the world’s first interstate highway linking Chicago, Los Angeles and San Diego, and providing only on-ramps and off-ramps at these three cities.”

San Diego industrial and academic communities will continue to have a clear competitive edge. Since 1991, when SDSC hired its first biologist, the center has been the recipient of a half billion dollars in NSF, NIH, corporate and other grants. About half of the full-time staff is engaged in deployment, support and administration of the infrastructure and NPACI programs, the other half in research, mostly biosciences. That should come as no surprise with Salk and Scripps across the street, relatively easy grid access and many of the UCSD biology division programs ranked among the top 10 in the nation.

“Nothing like the DTF has ever been attempted before. This will be the largest, most comprehensive infrastructure ever deployed for open scientific research,” says Dan Reed, director of NCSA and the Alliance and a principal DTF investigator. “Unprecedented amounts of data are being generated by new observations and sensors, and groups of scientists are conducting new simulations of increasingly complex phenomena. This new age of science requires a sustainable national infrastructure that can bring together new tools, powerful computers and the best minds in the country. This is the infrastructure that will allow us to solve the most pressing scientific problems of our time.”

Computational biology owes its existence to the biologists of UCSD, their UIUC counterparts and a growing community of partnering institutions. Scientific puzzlements from the Big Bang to AIDS, a chaotic and fibrillating heart, rational drug therapy, pollution free energy production, nanotechnology, better climate and earthquake predictors and all the lesser “bangs,” will find their place in the crosshairs of DTF equipped researchers. As more scientific inquiry is reduced to counting, writing better grid software tools and smarter algorithms, time becomes the scarcity and speed the next frontier.

Protein chemistry engages San Diego biologists and their partners because malformation of these life-giving molecules is at the core of so much disease — Parkinson’s, Huntington’s, Alzheimer’s, and who knows, maybe even the gene for evil. David Hart, SDSC manager of external relations, notes that more than 16,000 have been cataloged by shape and form as a baseline Protein Data Bank used for comparative studies that may one day lead to treatment and cures.

It’s hard to imagine a lot of new science not accompanied by profound changes in law, medicine and democracy itself.

A few years ago, a vice provost at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville observed of UCSD and its remarkable four-decade run: “They went out and hired a lot of good people and got good, very good. Fast.” He reflected, a little grudgingly, how he and many of his colleagues were stunned by the ascent of UCSD.

When Truman’s successor, President Eisenhower, motored down Broadway 41 years ago, San Diego seemed like a pretend city with the best zoo in the world, a healthy but untrustworthy aerospace industry, Scripps, the Navy’s carrier fleet, a morning and afternoon daily newspaper, Dr. Seuss and a lot of banks. But the city’s real future had quietly arrived in Torrey Pines, a couple hundred acres of eucalyptus and hardpan and a few tired buildings christened the University of California at San Diego. The germ of an industrial base was around the corner.

Today, almost all of the 130 companies that comprise San Diego bioscience and the legal and accounting firms they support can trace their tender roots to this university and the partnering influence of Salk, Scripps and Connect, a grouping that finally reached critical mass. Telecom may be the engine driving the 2001 bus, but most investment-grade visions for 2020 would take you elsewhere.

Presidents, for better or worse, punctuate our history. In 1913, for example, President Wilson, who liked statues, authorized planting a stone image of Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo on a bluff overlooking Ballast Point. The great explorer probably landed there in 1542 and declared it to be “a very good and enclosed port” and the property of Spain. When San Diego gets around to erecting another statue, how about one of Roger Revelle?

Tom O'Laughlin, a retired publisher and longtime San Diegan, is a University of Illinois alumnus and lives in Champaign, Ill., with wife Mary.