Another storm might sound like the last thing the region needs, but officials at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center were more than happy to announce yesterday that a Red Storm system is on its way.

Red Storm is a computer to be built by Cray Inc. that will be capable of performing up to 10 trillion calculations per second and will become the center's new workhorse.

The National Science Foundation gave a one-year, $9.7 million award to the center to obtain the machine, which will be similar in design to a larger, more powerful computer that Cray is installing at Sandia National Laboratories, a nuclear weapons lab in Albuquerque, N.M.

It was just three years ago that the Pittsburgh center installed its current workhorse, Lemieux. It has 3,000 processors and is capable of up to 6 trillion calculations per second -- or 6 teraflops, in computerspeak.

At the time, that speed made it the second most powerful computer in the world. Today, it ranks 25th.

Even so, "it's a very productive machine," providing 60 percent of the computing time used through the NSF last year, said Michael Levine, the center's co-scientific director.

The Red Storm computer being built at Sandia will be capable of up to 41.5 teraflops when it is completed next year, which likely will make it the world's most powerful. Earlier this week, IBM said its unfinished Blue Gene L System is sustaining speeds of 36 teraflops, which unofficially makes it the fastest for now.

The 2,000-processor, 10 teraflop version of Red Storm to be installed at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center would be relatively modest by comparison. But the machine's architecture promises to make it easy to expand over time, Levine said.

"It's our feeling that the machine could be rather smoothly expanded to 100 teraflops," he said, though that would require additional funding, presumably from the NSF.

Though the speed of all of these machines is hard for most people to comprehend, the demands of researchers trying mathematically to model complex phenomena such as proteins, earthquakes and storm systems have consistently outstripped the ability to build more powerful machines.

Unlike some early Cray supercomputers, which were liquid-cooled and famously compact, the Red Storm computer is air-cooled. Neal Singer, a Sandia spokesman, said that has resulted in a considerable cost savings and offers some operational advantages.

"When something goes wrong, it's a lot easier to fix," he said.

The Red Storm design is more compact than that of Lemieux, which has a footprint the size of a basketball court. The Red Storm system, by contrast, could fit into a spacious living room.

Ralph Roskies, the other co-scientific director, said the center hopes that the new Red Storm system will be operational within six months.

The Lemieux computer will continue to operate for the foreseeable future, Levine noted, though the center will pull the plug by the end of the week on its Cray T3E, a 1997 model that can perform 384 billion calculations per second.