The National Science Foundation is phasing out much of the financial support it had devoted to supercomputing research, opting instead to design software and build a national "cyberinfrastructure" of high-speed networks and distributed databases.
That decision has been unpopular with supercomputing experts, who say that their research has proved essential to a number of high-tech innovations. But NSF officials argue that tricky science and engineering problems are better solved by flexible computer networks than by massive machines.
