By Scott Nance, Washington Correspondent -- It's a new era at the Maui High Performance Computing Center. As of Oct. 1, the University of New Mexico is out as the center's operator, and the University of Hawaii, SAIC, and Boeing are in. Previously run under a cooperative agreement, it is now operating under task order contract that gives the Air Force much more direct oversight over the center, Operations Director Steve Karwoski said in a recent interview. Activities at MHPCC are going to be limited so that it will no longer be able to do business directly with commercial organizations outside of cooperative research and development agreements, Karwoski said. "We still support the Department of Defense in exactly the same way that we did it before--only better," he said. "The Air Force has a significant influence on how the center's going to be run and the types of applications that will be supported there." One of the distributed centers within the DoD's High Performance Computing Modernization Program, MHPCC's key resource is an IBM SP and the center says it dedicates more than 3 million hours of computing time annually to support high-priority projects for the Air Force and Navy. The University of Hawaii, SAIC, and Boeing are operating MHPCC under an initial four-year contract, with three two-year extension options. The previous cooperative agreement that governed the center was eight years old and a re-compete was required, and the Air Force chose to move to a direct contract for the future. "I personally saw this as a natural evolution," Karwoski said. "The center was initially started up, and it was somewhat of an experiment that was very successful. Now it's a production center and it's going to be doing production work for the Department of Defense research community. Under all those parameters, a contract is more appropriate than a cooperative agreement." Although the Air Force used to have oversight over MHPCC, up until Oct. 1 it was not owned by the air service. SAIC and Boeing are subcontracting for U of Hawaii to provide "additional research and scientific support for the contract" as well as administrative support, Karwoski said. "We will be running the center in more of a business-like manner," he said. "Everything that we do there will be related to a task-order contract or a cooperative research and development agreement. But everything will be tracked and managed very closely as a project. "Before, we were allowed to participate in academic collaborations, and there was a lot of flexibility on the part of the university to be able to establish those areas that they felt were important," he added. That prior flexibility just doesn't work very well in a "production DoD environment," Karwoski explained. "The security aspects are one factor," he said. "Just the way that the government does business under a contract, it has certain guidelines that you must following." Much of types of computing that have been hallmarks at MHPCC will remain, though. "We're still focusing on signal and image processing, modeling and simulation, and research in parallel computing," Karwoski said. MHPCC is a leader in applications that involve the processing of remotely collected data frm telescopes and other sensors. The center supports the Air Force Maui Space Surveillance Complex, located 10,000 feet up at the summit of the Mt. Haleakala volcano. The complex provides year-round observation of satellites, orbital debris, and other heavenly objects. MHPCC is developing the Maui Image Manager and Online Systems Archive, a Web-based tool for processing, viewing, and archiving data collected at the complex. MHPCC also works on a variety of DoD "Challenge Projects" that involve modeling and simulation, including turbulent flows around aircraft, predicting ship hydrodynamics, forecasting ocean circulation, and using adaptive optics to compensate for atmospheric turbulence. The center is connected directly to the Defense Research and Engineering Network (DREN). Under the new contract, MHPCC also has an expanded business development focus with a team headed up by an SAIC representative. "These people are all very [highly] experienced in finding new government business activities and growing the external government business that we're supporting at the center," Karwoski said. "The key is all this business will have a focus that is of interest to the Department of Defense and Air Force Research Laboratory." ---------- Scott Nance is the editor of New Technology Week and is based in Washington, DC.