This infrastructure award is for the acquisition of equipment to support research in distributed and parallel computing. The equipment consists of a network of workstations to support distributed processing research and an upgrade to an existing SIMD computer. The research supported includes the evaluation of parallel random access algorithms, numerical algorithms for modeling the flow of particles through a host medium, sequence planning for manufacturing, fault tolerance and load balancing in distributed networks, dynamic hard real time applications in a distributed environment, designing distributed real time intelligent systems, and the development of a wide area distributed robotics network. The future increases in raw computational power will come from the utilization of many processors to work on computational problems. There are many research problems associated with the effective utilization of many processors. These range from how the processors should communicate to the development of new algorithms to take advantage of multiple processors. Texas A&M University is building up a parallel computer laboratory and a distributed computer laboratory to perform experimental research on these issues.
