Cooperman, director of the Institute for Complex Scientific Software at Northeastern University in Boston, is studying Rubik's Cubes as a way of setting up machines to study combinatorial problems in science and operations research. He wants to record as many different states of the Rubik's Cube as possible, which he says will exceed the 20TB of capacity the $200,000 National Science Foundation grant recently afforded him.

Cooperman said that what he learns about the cube could be applied to operations research problems with business applications, such as determining the most efficient way to move goods to consumers.

"Operations research is about efficiently using resources," he said. "The Rubik's Cube is the same kind of mathematical problem."

Cooperman is the principal investigator in the Rubik's Cube research project, funded by a grant from the Major Research Instrumentation Program of the NSF. The grant will also be used by about 10 other members in Northeastern's computer science and electrical and computer engineering departments on projects that require large amounts of disk space.

The grant, which will provide the researchers with up to five times more storage than they could devote to a single problem before, is unusual in that the focus is not on the number of computers or CPUs but on the amount of disk space, Cooperman said.