1997 GORDON-BELL-PRIZE WINNERS

The Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty which forbids the testing of nuclear weapons, is responsible for the dramatic performance gains re ported in this year's Gordon Bell Prize competition. The connection be tween the treaty and the Bell Prize is simple to understand: One way t o maintain confidence in the nuclear stockpile needed for national sec urity is to use computation to tell you what you would have learned fr om testing. The recognition that such computations far exceeded the ca pability of existing computers led the US Department of Energy to init iate the Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI) program in high-performance computing. Four of this year's entries reported resul t on ASCI-RED, the first result of this program.