Dreaming Up Ways to Make Life Easier : Technology: Two supercomputer scientists envision enabling consumers to save steps by routinely hooking their PCs up to the larger machines.

Mal Kalos is not a “Star Trek” fan. Irving Wladawsky-Berger is. Both are headed where no one has gone before.

The two supercomputer scientists represent the diverging paths the computer industry is taking: commercial applications and pure research.

Yet both say those paths may not stray too far apart. They predict it will be only a few years before computers become an everyday presence, something we carry around to link us to a vast global information network run by supercomputers.

“I think that kind of a model will work very well for lots of consumer applications, where you will have a laptop or wristwatch computer talking to the supercomputer,” said Wladawsky-Berger, the head of the IBM Power Parallel Division in Somers, N.Y. “You’ll be talking to your wristwatch soon.”

As the leader of the IBM push into the supercomputer market, Wladawsky-Berger sees thousands of ways to harness tiny consumer-level computers to large networks to do everyday jobs that make life easier.

“It could be your car ‘talking’ to the service station, saying, ‘I don’t feel so good,’ ” he said. “Or think of multimedia digital libraries. From your laptop you can look for video clips and images as well as text.”

Supercomputers already are allowing scientists and engineers to make stunning advances in research and design, and in testing ultracomplex theories in fields such as biochemistry and physics.

The National Science Foundation and MCI Communications Corp. have formed a partnership to link the four supercomputing research centers in the United States with the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., to allow the five sites to share their supercomputers.

The five sites can exchange data at 155 megabits per second--10,000 times the speed of the typical 14.4-kilobit modem now standard in most personal computers.

Kalos, director of the Cornell center, believes massively parallel processing will be central to the next century of supercomputer development.

The practice of taking individual computer chips and linking them together to create a much larger computer has begun to resemble the evolution of the human brain, and may ultimately develop the science fiction capacity to acquire human traits, such as a “personality,” Kalos says.

“Of course, the machine does not have the exquisite connectivity of the brain,” Kalos said. “It also does not have the benefit of the stored knowledge that we call experience, but you’re already beginning to see capabilities that are comparable in some rough measure with the human brain.”

Wladawsky-Berger says one of his favorite movies is “Star Trek IV,” when the crew of the Enterprise returns to 1980s San Francisco and is forced to use a little late 23rd-Century computer technology to repair a serious head injury.

Wladawsky-Berger says it won’t take nearly that long.

“It changes radically every 12 to 18 months,” he said. “It won’t be long before a radiologist can afford a desktop version of a supercomputer or surgeons can practice their technique before even doing the surgery.”

Kalos concurred: “The kinds of things we can do or dream of doing has exploded.”