Sir

Colin Macilwain's News article of 22 January and your leading article of 29 January (Nature 391 311–312 & 419; 1998) offer one perspective on the US Department of Energy's Academic Strategic Alliances Program (ASAP). As the senior research administrators of the five universities involved, we offer another.

ASAP research will advance and accelerate high-performance computer simulation of physical systems. Researchers at our universities will develop computational algorithms, software and visualization tools for some of the world's most powerful computers and apply them to challenging problems in science and engineering, many of them important in industry. In the course of this work, graduate students and postdocs will be trained in advanced technologies that will have far-reaching applications throughout society.

The awards to our universities derived from a peer-reviewed competition among 22 proposals selected from 48 pre-proposals by many of the country's leading academic institutions. All the ASAP research is unclassified and in well-established academic fields, many of them (including the explosive shocks and turbulence mentioned in your leading article) covered by leading journals such as Nature. All our seminars are open to the public and our results will be published in the open literature.

One of the applications of ASAP research will be to the important national goal of Science Based Stockpile Stewardship. This Department of Energy programme, which has strong bipartisan support in the government, will contribute to national security as the United States continues its halt of nuclear testing and so complies with the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

Further details of our ASAP research can be found on the Web by following the links at http://www.llnl.gov/asci-alliances/centers.html