Introduction

I have been asked to discuss and analyze the factors involved in the demise of the NSF Office of Advanced Scientific Computing (OASC) in Princeton, New Jersey—the John von Neumann Center (JVNC). My goal is to see if we can extract the factors that contributed to the failure to see whether the experience can be used to avoid such failures in the future. Analysis is much easier in hindsight than before the fact, so I will try to be as objective as I can in my analysis.

The "Pre-Lax Report" Period

During the 1970s, almost all of the supercomputers installed were found in government installations and were not generally accessible to the university research community. For those researchers who could not

gain access to these supercomputers, this was a frustrating period. A few found it was relatively easy to obtain time on supercomputers in Europe, especially in England and West Germany.

By the end of the decade, a number of studies, proposals, and other attempts were done to generate funds to make available large-scale computational facilities for some of the university research community. All of this was happening during a period when U.S. policy was tightening rather than relaxing the mechanisms for acquiring large-scale computing facilities.

The Lax Report

The weight of argument in the reports from these studies and proposals moved NSF to appoint Peter Lax, of New York University, an NSF Board Member, as chairman of a committee to organize a Panel on Large-Scale Computing in Science and Engineering. The panel was sponsored jointly by NSF and the Department of Defense in cooperation with the Department of Energy and NASA. The end product of this activity was the "Report of the Panel on Large-Scale Computing in Science and Engineering," usually referred to as the Lax Report, dated December 26, 1982.

The recommendations of the panel were straightforward and succinct. The overall recommendation was for the establishment of a national program to support the expanded use of high-performance computers. Four components to the program were

• increased access to supercomputing facilities for scientific and engineering research;

• increased research in computational mathematics, software, and algorithms;

• training of personnel in high-performance computing; and

• research and development for the implementation of new supercomputer systems.

The panel indicated that insufficient funds were being expended at the time and suggested an interagency and interdisciplinary national program.

Establishment of the Centers

In 1984, once the NSF acquired additional funding from Congress for the program, NSF called for proposals to establish national supercomputer centers. Over 20 proposals were received, and these were evaluated in an extension of the usual NSF peer-review process. In February 1985, NSF selected four of the proposals and announced awards to establish four national supercomputer centers. A fifth center was added in early 1986.

The five centers are organizationally quite different. The National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois-Urbana/Champaign and the Cornell Theory Center are formally operated by the universities in which those centers are located. The JVNC is managed by a nonprofit organization, the Consortium for Scientific Computing, Inc. (CSC), established solely to operate this center. The San Diego Supercomputer Center is operated by the for-profit General Atomics Corporation and is located on the campus of the University of California at San Diego. Finally, the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center is run jointly by the University of Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon University, and Westinghouse Electric Corporation. NSF established the OASC that reported directly to the Director of NSF as the NSF program office through which to fund these centers.

While the selected centers were being established (these centers were called Phase 2 centers), NSF supported an extant group of supercomputing facilities (Phase 1 centers) to start supplying cycles to the research community at the earliest possible time. Phase 1 centers included Purdue University and Colorado State University, both with installed CYBER 205 computers; and the University of Minnesota, Boeing Computer Services, and Digital Productions, Inc., all with CRAY X-MP equipment. It is interesting to note that all these centers, which had been established independent of the OASC initiative, were phased out once the Phase 2 centers were in operation. All Phase 1 centers are now defunct as service centers for the community, or they are at least transformed rather dramatically into quite different entities. Indeed, NSF "used" these facilities, supported them for a couple of years, and then set them loose to "dry up."

From the very beginning, it was evident there were insufficient funds to run all Phase 2 centers at adequate levels. In almost all cases, the centers from the beginning have been working within very tight budgets, which has resulted in difficult decisions to be made by management and a less aggressive program than the user community demands. However, with a scarce and expensive resource such as supercomputers, such limitations are not unreasonable. During the second round of funding for an additional five-year period, the NSF has concluded that the JVNC should be closed. The closing of that center will alleviate some of the fiscal pressure on the remaining four centers. Let us now focus on the JVNC story.