The Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, which just last month unveiled a new computer workhorse, has received a $52 million contract to assume an expanded role in the National Science Foundation's growing TeraGrid computer network.

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The national science agency has increasingly focused its funding for high-end computing on the TeraGrid, a cyber-infrastructure that links some of the most powerful computers across the country and has the combined capacity of performing 60 trillion calculations per second. The Pittsburgh center's two computers alone can perform 16 trillion calculations per second.

The network is designed for problems requiring analysis of trillions of bytes, or terabytes, of information. The printed collection of the Library of Congress is the equivalent of 10 terabytes.

The Pittsburgh center grabbed the largest hunk of $150 million that the foundation awarded last week for TeraGrid projects.

In addition to providing its new Cray XT3 supercomputer, dubbed Big Ben, and its older machine, LeMieux, for TeraGrid users, the Pittsburgh center will be in charge of user support and security for the TeraGrid.

The new five-year contract, signed on Monday, is especially significant for the Pittsburgh center because, in contrast to the $9.7 million it received from the foundation last fall to buy the Cray computer, it will support day-to-day operations.

"It's very good news," said Ralph Roskies, co-scientific director of the center. "We haven't had five years of funding in a very long time."

Charlie Catlett, executive director of the TeraGrid, said the contract reflects Pittsburgh's growing reputation in the supercomputing community.

"I think it's a real statement of success for them, if you look over the last three or four years," said Catlett, a senior fellow at the Computation Institute of Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Chicago. The construction and operation of LeMieux, one of the world's fastest computers when it was installed four years ago, was a significant accomplishment.

"With that machine," Catlett said, "they showed that they were a premier place."

It wasn't just the hardware that impressed people, but what the staff was able to do with it, he said. The Pittsburgh center has developed an excellent reputation for working with scientists, such as "tuning" their software so that it performs well on a particular computer. That's why the Pittsburgh center will now lead user support for the entire network, he said.

The prominent new role for the Pittsburgh center is the latest twist in its up-and-down history. It was one of five original supercomputing centers established by the National Science Foundation in the 1980s, part of the agency's effort to make high-performance computers available for scientists doing nonclassified research.

But the agency's computing policy shifted and it dropped support for some of the centers, focusing much of its financial support on just two, the San Diego Supercomputer Center and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois.

The Pittsburgh center continued to receive some science foundation support, but also scrambled during the 1990s for support from the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Energy, as well as from the state. At its launch four years ago, the TeraGrid was focused on San Diego and Illinois; Pittsburgh wasn't wired into the network until two years ago.

"There were years when we were right in the middle of things and there were years when we were on the periphery," said Roskies, a University of Pittsburgh physicist who co-directs the center with Michael Levine, a Carnegie Mellon University physicist. "Now, we're back in the middle of things."

In addition to the $52 million contract, Catlett said Pittsburgh's role in user support and security means it also will receive $5 million or $6 million of the $48 million the foundation allotted to his TeraGrid headquarters operation.

"A lot of this money is going to be spent here because much of it is going to staffing," Roskies said. He anticipates a few new hires to the staff, which now numbers just under 100. The $10 million the center will receive annually from the new contract will account for more than half of its annual budget, he said.

The center is a joint effort of Pitt and Carnegie Mellon, along with Westinghouse Electric Co.

Though the TeraGrid has the potential to link several powerful computers to tackle huge problems, Catlett said it more typically is used to tie different computers together to handle different aspects of large problems. One researcher, for instance, might have a large database stored in Illinois that he wants to run on a Pittsburgh computer and then send the results to Argonne to be converted into graphic visualizations.

"It provides the user with a seamless environment," Catlett said.