The NIC people are those space cowboys at the supercomputer labs that do high tech imaging, systems simulation, global weather prediction, that sort of thing. I don't normally associate much with them, but I was obligated to attend this particular session -- this is where you had to sign up for the JPL tour, which I would not have missed for anything.

There was nothing much else shaking here outside of administrative stuff. There was some discussion of IBM's recently announced "Highly Parallel Supercomputing Laboratory": a large loosely-coupled network of RS/6000 RISC machines, and a collaboration between IBM, SSI and Thinking Machines Corporation.