European Stars And Stripes (Newspaper) - February 25, 1989, Darmstadt, Hesse                                High tech by Sharon Cohen associated press hey re super Swift High tech superstars that can do anything from design nuclear warheads to build a better yacht. Supercomputers Are used by the government the military universities and Fortune 500 companies to help crack codes forecast weather design aircraft conduct geological exploration or simulate the effects of nuclear explosions. The supercomputer is important economically and socially said Peter Patton a computer consultant in Minnesota. They re used in everything from the mundane to the Sublime designing appliances to developing new life saving techniques and  that Range he said can help shape America s role in the world Economy. The whole name of the game is competitive advantage in the International Market said Patton director of technology assessment at the super performance computing service of Dat quest inc., a marketing forecasting firm. The key to maintaining that competitive advantage is faster design reduced government certification time better  the two major . Supercomputer companies Are Cray research inc. And Eta systems inc., a subsidiary of control data corp. Its Competition three japanese computer giants Fujitsu Hitachi and Nec there also Are about three dozen smaller so called mini supercomputer companies in the United states Patton said. Some experts believe the japanese Are threatening America s dominance of the Industry. We opened a very Large Lead and we no longer have that Large Lead Patton said. One of Japan s main advantages he said is it has the lion s share of semiconductor computer chips Market. We gave up on the semiconductor  but other experts say it s too Early to talk of the japanese overtaking the United states. Even though Cray machines use a lot of japanese components i Don t think it s fair to say they re ahead in any Way shape or form said Michael Burwen president of Palo Alto management group a consulting firm. There Are a lot of people who say the japanese Are a very big threat to supercomputers he said. I Don t think the evidence is in. The japanese certainly have not been Able to demonstrate they can penetrate anything outside their Home Market in this  about 350 supercomputers have been installed worldwide. . Customers include Nasa the National cancer Institute and los Alamos National Laboratory location of the first Cray introduced in 1976. Supercomputers can do billions of calculations a second. For example a Bible concordance an alphabetical referencing by word that took a scholar 17 years to do in the mid-1700s and required 1,000 hours on a computer in 1956 can be done on a Cray supercomputer in 20 seconds Patton said. Although experts sometimes disagree on what a supercomputer is it generally is described As the fastest largest most expensive machine at any time one that can do problems others can t. Burwen also said 44 percent of All supercomputers Are in private Industry 37 percent in government installations and 19 percent in universities. Nowadays supercomputers Are changing Industry because products can not Only be designed and prototyped on screen but be tested and evaluated. And have Complete data performance before you touch tool to steel he said. Automakers for one can do a design in six months instead of 18 months he said. You can literally take years off the design  supercomputers have also begun to simulate crash testing for autos. And Oil companies use supercomputers to get the Best production in Petroleum exploration. If they get 1 percent More Oil out of a Reservoir it pays for itself 100 times Over Patton said. What if it s a $10 million computer if you get $20 billion More Oil out of a Reservoir among Cray s customers Are America s big three automakers Volkswagen Fiat and Petroleum giants such As Shell and Chevron. A Cray supercomputer also was used to help design stars & stripes the yacht Dennis Conner sailed in 1987 when he won the America s cup. Two competing syndicates also used Cray technology said company spokesman John Swenson. Scientists designing supercomputers Are toiling in an Industry constantly trying to produce faster machines. Cray plans to have a new supercomputer ready this year or next and it s expected to be 100 times faster than his original machine. In 1992-94, he Hopes to produce the Cray-4,1,000 times More powerful. And Swenson said that won t be the end. As he explained we still Don t see the  Nasa s supercomputer is use for aerospace Industry research. Latest color new graphics program by Peter h. Lewis new York timezone of the most intriguing products at the recent Mac world exposition in san Francisco was super card a prototype program from Silicon Beach software that allows Apple macintosh users to construct customized software. The company Calls it a second generation personal software tool kit. The first generation for those who Are unfamiliar with the macintosh world was hype card a program that Apple includes with every Mac it Sells. Hype card like the Mac itself was one of the few products in the personal computer Industry that could rightfully be called revolutionary. It was introduced a year ago and has spawned its own software sub Industry called Slackware. Super card which is scheduled to be available in late Spring in the United states at a Price of $199, is clearly evolutionary since it carries Forward the concepts of hype card and exploits the advances in hardware. In hype card the user constructs programs As if they were stacks of individual cards each one containing information that can be linked to one or More cards of information in any Way the user chooses. The links do not have to follow the structured formulas of conventional data bases or lists and they Are not limited to text. They can hold digitized sounds or photographs drawings or even video images. I might Call up a card from a stack of  on the card is a picture of a Cedar with descriptive text. There is a Blue Jay in the tree. By pointing at a Button linked to the Blue Jay i might trigger a link to a stack of other Birds or to a stack of Bird Call sounds or to a stack of baseball team mascots. Pointing at the tree itself i might trigger a card listing symptoms of the dreaded Cedar fever with a Button that produces the sound of someone saying a Choo the reasoning behind the links is whatever i want it to be. One Man s link is another Man s sausage someone once said hype card cards Are All the same size designed to fit in the 9-Inch window of the Basic Mac. Because the Basic Mac has a Black and White screen hype card does not support color. The newer Mac ii computers give users Access to bigger screens color and better sound but hype card does not exploit those features at least in its current version. Although some reviewers called super card a hype card clone it is really More of a hype card Extension just As another Silicon Beach program super paint is an Extension of Apple s original Mac paint. The developers worked closely with Apple to make super card As compatible with hype card As possible and Apple executives gave the new program their blessings at the Mac world exposition. Beyond color and flexible card size super card will have other flashy features. It will allow the user to concoct a program that can be Given to a Friend who does not have super card. Hype card stacks by contrast have to be run in conjunction with hype card. The super card applications exploit the conventional macintosh look and feel including pop Down and tear off menus toolboxes dialog boxes and scrolling and re sizable windows. Several stacks can be open at once in super card and there can be several windows in a card. Those features Are not found in hype card. Page 16 the stars and stripes saturday february 25,1989