The Grand Challenge Application Groups competition provides one mechanism for the support of multidisciplinary teams of scientists and engineers to meet the goals of the High Performance Computing and Communications (HPCC) Initiative in Fiscal Year 1992. The ideal proposal provided not only excellence in science: focussed problem with potential for substantial impact in a critical area of science and engineering but also significant interactions between scientific and comptational activities, usually involving mathematical, computer or computational scientists, that would have impact in high-performance computational activity beyond the specific scientific or engineering problem area(s) or discipline being studied. This proposal is for the direct implementation of three computing recommendations of the Astronomy and Astrophyusics Survey Committee. It will implement a prototype of the next generation of astronomical telescope systems - remotely located telescopes connected by high speed networks to very high performance, scalable architecture computers and on-line data archives. The very computationally intensive algorithms for calibration and imaging of radio syntheseis array observations will be optimized and new algorithms which utilize the massively parallel CM-5 will be developed.
