Significant progress was made in each of the targeted application areas, and breakthroughs in software systems and methodologies have been made which greatly enhance the ability of users to access and make effective use of high-performance systems. This project focused on usability of, and application development in distributed high performance computing environments. The critical question addressed by the computer science research under this grant was how to make high-end computing and visualization resources efficiently accessible to users. A PSE provides a set of tools for users to carry out research in their area, while hiding complexity of the underlying computer software and hardware architecture. The shortcoming of PSEs is that they are specialized for a single application area and require major programming effort.
Components differ from standard software pieces such as subroutines, libraries, or objects.
Component composition involves modifying and linking binaries, rather than source code which must then be re-compiled. We built a prototype component architecture toolkit called the LSA which encapsulates software from many sources for manipulating, analyzing, and solving large sparse linear systems of equations. Those components can be arbitrarily distributed across the Internet, and at the NCSA Alliance 98 meeting it was demonstrated seamlessly connecting components in California, Illinois, Indiana, and Minnesota. Currently we are building a presentation for the SC98 High Performance Computing Challenge, which will tie together internationally distributed software and hardware components to carry out the largest simulation ever attempted for industrial mold-filling applications. Astronomy Rotating gaseous disks similar to the one which presumably formed our own Solar System are now known to be common around young stars.