The State remains firmly in the dark ages as far as access to the most powerful machines on earth are concerned, writes Kevin Cahill.

When it comes to supercomputers, the Republic's a desert. And the desert status of the State in this critical area throws a serious shadow over the Government's €100 million-plus a year policy of recruiting leading-edge scientists and scientific teams, such as the Cotter team from Britain, announced with great fanfare recently by Science Foundation Ireland (SFI).

But what is a supercomputer and why are supercomputers both important and different from all other computers?

The simple definition of a supercomputer, given by Dr Jorge Stadler, the marketing manager for NEC, now the leading supercomputer manufacturer, is that it is simply "the most powerful and fastest computer around at any given moment in time".

This does not tell you much however. Apart from costing €20-€30 million each, the devices are designed using special components that make them uniquely powerful when it comes to dealing with near infinite mathematical equations and large models, like the whole of the earth, in real time.

Supercomputers are usually very large, very sci-fi and situated in hangar-sized air-conditioned rooms, with serious security on access.

For the older amongst us, a comparison might be between an old steam-driven threshing machine, representing commonplace computers in offices and companies, and a combined harvester, representing supercomputers. But a combined harvester that had been built by Ferrari, and could lift 50 tons of rocks, thresh the wheat and go from 0-90 in seven seconds, all at the same time.

Supercomputers are serious stuff. They are the fate of nations and of companies, now, and will be even more so in the very near future.

In simple terms, they are the biggest and best tools available on earth and Ireland hasn't got even one.

So how many of these extraordinary devices, the most complex creation of mankind's mind to date, should Ireland have ?

The answer is four. This figure is based on the country with the greatest known population of supercomputers, the US, which has about one supercomputer per one million of its population.

Not that the US possesses the fastest or biggest computer in the world. That honour goes to Japan. Two years ago the US lost its lead in a race where the ultimate rewards are potentially staggering.

Twenty years ago, Dr Koybachi, the elderly chairman of NEC - a big but not the biggest high-tech company - said that to keep his company competitive it had to have three things: communications, control and computers. Of these, the latter was the most important.

He told your author that leadership in the area of supercomputers was what NEC, and Japan, had to aim for. He chose to use the design concepts used by the US's greatest supercomputer genius, Seymour Cray, but concepts which have largely been abandoned in the United States.

It was Mr Koybachi's company that delivered to the Japanese government's Earth Simulator Institute the most powerful and the fastest computer ever built. It was more powerful and faster than the next 12, all bar one US-manufactured machine, in the world Top 500 ranking of supercomputers. The NEC machine at the Earth Simulator site, can do 35 thousand, thousand million sums a second. It can model the entire earth's weather systems, as they happen.

SFI, with the task of keeping the Republic intellectually competitive in this century, has no supercomputer policy as such, according to its spokesperson. And, despite having Richard Hirsh, the American National Science Foundation's supercomputer expert on its on its payroll, and another leading supercomputer specialist arriving next year, there is no apparent understanding of what possession or lack of it might mean to the nation's competitive and scientific future.

There are two quick and simple ways to explain why actual possession of supercomputers matters.

First, while most of the Top 500 supercomputer sites are government, and many, mainly US, are military or intelligence sites, 134 of the 500 sites are commercial. That number is rising sharply, well above current forecasts, as commercial companies realise that it's "get and use supercomputers or die".

Germany's BMW is the most supercomputered company on earth. It's got 12 machines. The next nearest companies to it are Western Geophysics of the US, a geological survey company, with five machines, and a similar company from France, CGG, also with five. If BMW needs 12 supercomputers, surely the Republic needs some at least?

Mr Hirsh is an advocate of Grids, many computers locked together, but that is akin to saying that the State can get by with hiring a single combined harvester from abroad.

The number of combined harvesters you need should be proportionate to the acres you have, and SFI is planning for Ireland to have many intellectual acres in the years ahead.

It needs to get the Republic into position and onto the starting grid by making sure that its harvest of intellectuals has the best tools, locally available, with which to work.