Users can join or quit a session at any time, and they can participate in several sessions simultaneously. If they miss a meeting, says Larry Jackson, the Habanero team leader, they can replay it later. Habanero generates an easily searchable table listing all of the key events of the session. The initiator of the vote can submit it to the group and each collaborator receives a vote window prompting a reply. The Chemical Engineering team is using this tool for deciding the parameters for their next reactor simulation on the Alliance's computational resources.
Researchers can quickly familiarize themselves with the application, which minimizes training.
For example, if an engineer is simulating a complex chemical process, the Chemical Engineering Workbench automatically searches for chemistry databases that may be distributed over several Alliance member sites. If the appropriate data do not exist, the workbench automatically identifies a remote computer that has the relevant code, which will then carry out the necessary computations. The result of this computation is brought back to the workbench for use during the rest of the simulation. Future releases of Habanero will build in additional computing tools so researchers can use the framework more extensively to generate and analyze data. Last updated Apr. 6, 1999.