We are trying to understand the interaction between hardware design, operating system style, and programming style as the hardware and software technologies evolve. The Institute for New Generation Computer Technology (ICOT) installed in the DCRT one of the PSI-III logic programming computers in October 1991. The PSI-III computer runs a conventional Open Software Foundation (OSF) operating environment. We investigated the characteristics of this machine but found that the implementation was too immature to be of any scientific use for American workers. Using the InterNet from workstations in our computational environment, we were able to successfully communicate with our collaborators at ICOT. During the previous year the InterNet connection between the USA and Japan had not been reliable enough for day-by-day working communications. The daily transmission of faxes had served our communication needs. In switching to InterNet communications we found that letters, data and manuscripts could be more rapidly and effectively transmitted. In searching for tools to more effectively use the InterNet, we found Gopher from the University of Minnesota and WAIS from Thinking Machines Inc. We investigated representing and retrieving biological information using these tools. Our collaborators at ICOT were able to move the program for simulating protein folding from one processor to a 256-processor array. As they demonstrated at the Fifth Generation Computer Systems (FGCS) symposium in Tokyo in June 1992, the program runs 180 times faster. This is about 70% parallel efficiency which is very good. We plan to collaboratively apply this parallel computational technology to a number of other biological problems in the next years.
