Newsgroups: comp.parallel
From: Bernhardt1 <bernhardt1@aol.com>
Subject: announcement - NII Testbed - Supercomputing '95
Organization: America Online, Inc. (1-800-827-6364)
Date: Sun, 5 Feb 1995 01:38:40 GMT
Message-ID: <3gr7c1$60n@newsbf02.news.aol.com>


SUPERCOMPUTING '95 ANNOUNCES JURY FOR MAJOR CONFERENCE EVENT; 

SUBMISSIONS DUE FEBRUARY 14

Tom DeFanti, Director of the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the
University of Illinois at Chicago, who serves as volunteer Information
Architect and committee member of the Supercomputing '95 conference,
recently announced with Co-architect Rick Stevens, Director of the
Mathematics and Computer Science Division of Argonne National Laboratory,
the members of the "NII Testbed" jury. 

The NII Testbed, a major conference event, will feature national
collaborations using HPCC technologies, virtual reality, and scientific
visualization, with emphasis on manufacturing, health care, education and
lifelong learning, environmental studies, and computational science and
engineering.

The jury, knowledgeable about technology and high-end applications, will
judge submissions in the coming months and proactively develop linkages
between potential contributors and resources. Jury members are:

  * Jack Donegan, Assistant to the Director, San Diego Supercomputer
    Center (and jury chair);
  * Robert P. Borchers, Director of the Division of Advanced Scientific
    Computing, National Science Foundation;
  * David Cheney, Consultant, US Department of Energy;
  * Robert E. Kahn, President, Corporation for National Research
    Initiatives;
  * Tom Kalil, Director to the National Economic Council,
    The White House;
  * Lee Holcomb, Director, High Performance Computing and
    Communications Office, NASA Headquarters; and,
  * Stephen L. Squires, Special Assistant for Information Technology,
    Advanced Research Projects Agency.

DeFanti explains that "the goal of the NII Testbed is to encourage the
development of teams, tools, hardware, system software, and human
interface models on an accelerated schedule to enable national-scale,
multi-site collaborations to facilitate solutions to National Challenge
and Grand Challenge problems. This mechanism of a national conference Call
for Participation has a history of working well and breaking down barriers
among institutions. New paradigms for networking and scalable computing
interoperability and optimization will result, as well as methods for
graphical user interaction."

In order to demonstrate a national-scale distributed computing
environment, Stevens and other researchers from Argonne National
Laboratory are spearheading the development of the Information Wide Area
Year (I-WAY), an experimental high-performance network that will link
dozens of the country's fastest computers and advanced visualization
environments. This network will be based on ATM (Asynchronous Transfer
Mode) technology, an emerging standard for advanced telecommunications
networks. This network will provide the wide-area high-performance
backbone for experimental networking activities onsite at Supercomputing
95. It will be built from a combination of existing network connectivity
and some additional connectivity and services provided by multiple
nationwide service providers.

DeFanti, Stevens, and the distinguished members of the NII Testbed jury
are seeking contributors who will develop and demonstrate large-scale
simulations, interactive CAVE virtual-reality applications (including
CAVE-to-CAVE), or large-screen, stereo applications (to be demonstrated on
a large-screen, stereo projection system being developed jointly by the
Electronic Visualization Laboratory, NCSA, Silicon Graphics, Inc., and
Ampro). Of major interest are applications that attempt to demonstrate
geographically separated homogeneous and heterogeneous supercomputers and
scalable computers working together.

The jury is looking for projects that assure broad national impact. They
will judge submissions based on the following selection criteria: content
quality, content completion potential, cost limitations, and likelihood of
onsite support for special-purpose displays. The jury will also help
identify additional support avenues, solicit contributors, find the
resources to develop the needed virtual-reality technology, and/or work
with vendors to provide onsite equipment support.

The initial deadline for the NII Testbed is February 14. Interested
researchers can obtain a copy of the Supercomputing '95 Call for
Participation by contacting the San Diego Supercomputer Center, 10100
Hopkins Dr., La Jolla, CA 92093-0505, (619) 534-5100, sc95@sdsc.edu, or
via the Web: http://sc95.sdsc.edu/SC95. For a copy of the NII Testbed
call, or for more information on the I-WAY, contact Tom DeFanti at
tom@eecs.uic.edu. Supercomputing '95 will be held December 3-8, 1995 in
San Diego.

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