Proposed Research. Five Research Projects Will Develop Underlying, Enabling Technologies to 2.1 Driver Applications 2.1.1 toward Distributed Laboratories for Scientiic Experimentation

The continuing merger of computer and communication technologies is leading to a new comput-ing/communications infrastructure of unprecedented magnitude, enabling new applications with broad economic and social impact. Yet, such applications pose major challenges to researchers in Computer Science and in application domains. Distributed Laboratories. The topic of the proposed research program is the realization of distributed laboratories, where individuals can interact with each other, and more importantly, with powerful, distributed computational tools as readily as if all were located in a single site. Our intent is to permit scientists, engineers, and managers at geographically distinct locations (including individuals \tele-commuting" from home) to combine their expertise in solving shared problems, by allowing them to simultaneously view, interact with, and steer sophisticated computations executing on high performance distributed computing platforms. The research results and tools resulting from the requested infrastructure will have broad application in many domains. However, we will use two speciic applications to focus our eeorts, and to help ensure that our results and software tools are properly integrated: 1. A distributed laboratory for experimentation with high performance numeric computations for applications in molecular physics, atmospheric sciences, and manufacturing systems. 2. A distributed laboratory for studying the behavior of future-generation, large-scale telecom-munication networks through high performance parallel and distributed simulation models of wired and wireless networks, called the virtual telecommunication networks application. support these applications. Three are primarily concerned with \middle-ware" software and technologies that will be directly utilized by the driver applications. The rst project will study the dynamic monitoring, adaptation, and interactive steering of high performance computations for on-line control of \virtual laboratory instruments" and for \what-if? " experimentation with complex simulation models by distributed laboratory users. The second project will explore the eecient execution of simulation programs, especially discrete-event simulations of telecommunication network models, on multi-granular compute servers (servers containing both tightly-coupled multiprocessors and loosely-coupled workstations). The third project will explore the collaboration technologies required in distributed laboratories, including the architecture of CSCW systems, user interfaces, and the indexing of video and audio records about experiments. The fourth and fth project are concerned, respectively, with the distributed systems and telecommunication networking technologies underlying distributed laboratories. They will provide technical support and software for each of the three middle-ware projects. The emphasis in distributed systems research is on support for shared-state in multi-granular and distributed computing environments. Networking research is concerned with providing the necessary communication facilities for distributed …