It will make an effort to increase diversity in the field of computational science. Greater diversity will, in turn, help the United States solve complex problems that require creative, fresh ways of viewing the world. There are immediate applications in tribal economic development, natural resource management and research, and communications that will help preserve the language and culture of rural, isolated bands. Universal Access Argonne computer scientists have, for many years, spearheaded the development of parallel programming tools, parallel languages, virtual environments, communication mechanisms, and numerical libraries for scientific computing. Such software tools and systems are the cornerstone of truly effective scientific problem solving.
Portable tools ensure that programs can run on a wide variety of parallel computing environments.
Scalable tools ensure that software written for smaller machines will also run efficiently on high-performance parallel computers. As Alliance partners, Argonne computer scientists are participating in a broad range of Alliance activities, including each of the Enabling Technologies infrastructure development and deployment teams. A major bottleneck in the effective use of geographically distributed systems has been the inability to schedule and manage the resources. Some members of the Argonne group will focus on developing software for managing distributed systems so that users can readily schedule applications and access resources on the National Technology Grid. The Alliance is one of the most challenging and ambitious projects in computational science ever undertaken.