It allows the Alliance members to provide a more robust service than available individually. While the hardware resources at each center are well documented, there is no corresponding inventory of the software and technical expertise. A comprehensive inventory will be developed to assist the consulting and code conversion staff in identifying opportunities where sharing can occur and where unique areas of expertise exist. The inventory will also be used to produce an electronic brochure highlighting Alliance resources, domains of expertise, and successes. In developing applications for parallel computing systems, Alliance centers have found that different applications have differing computational needs.
Some applications use many processors, others only use a few.
Some require extensive preprocessing, others require very little. Some use vast amounts of memory while others use relatively little. No center can efficiently or economically support all possible combinations of resource utilization. The broad range of configurations available through PhAROh , however, will allow Alliance centers to help users evaluate their application needs and match those needs with the appropriate metacenter resources. Typically, applications begin as low-capacity projects, but as the complexity of research increases, demands for processing power grow.