9413948 Hollebeek This award is to a consortium group from The University of Pennsylvania, the University of Maryland, and the University of Illinois at Chicago. The consortium is proposing to develop a scalable, wide area high performance meta-computer for problems which require numerically intensive analysis of large amounts of geographically distributed data. The experimental facilities will include a high-speed network linking existing parallel computers and high-performance clusters of workstations at the three institutions. In addition each institution in the consortium will acquire or upgrade a parallel machine. Software will be developed to implement the meta-computer concept whereby an individual using a node at any site will have access to all other nodes and distributed data as needed, regardless of the location of these entities. The meta-computer design will be scalable in that additional distributed nodes can be added at any time. High speed access to the Internet will link the geographically-distant components, and technologies such as ATM will provide the local connections. Research and application areas to be addressed using these facilities include particle physics and condensed matter physics, imaging and virtual reality, and digital libraries. ***
