9527186 Sunderam The proposed research address enabling technologies to support collaborative, distributes computer-based problem solving in the natural sciences. The research emphasis of this effort will be on problem solving environments in scientific disciplines, and on computer science issues in multimodal distributed systems. the project will be driven by the requirements of collaborative research and problem-solving in natural sciences, i.e. chemistry, physics, biochemistry, and allied fields. In these, and other laboratory/instrument based sciences, an increasingly common research methodology involves the use and dependence upon computation, interaction, graphical display of data, and data storage. The overall goal of this project is to evolve a virtual distributed computing framework that integrally supports human AV communication, high performance heterogeneous computing, and distributed data management facilities. this research will involve analysis of computational transformations and graphical viewing of results produced by scientific instruments, and the development of methodologies and tools to enhance the experiment-results-analysis phases of scientific endeavor, in a collaborative distributed setting. It is expected that this project will culminate in a tangible suite of software tools that facilitate such collaborative frameworks.