Science: Wayne Pfeiffer and his colleagues at the San Diego Supercomputer Center didn’t mind working over the holidays on a proposal due 2 February to the National Science Foundation (NSF). They knew their counterparts at other NSF-funded supercomputing centers would be doing the same thing. And besides, the prize seemed worth the extra effort--a $200 million machine capable of performing at the petascale level (1015 operations a second) and, with it, leadership of the next generation in supercomputing.