Information Technology Frontiers for a New Millenium HPCC Workshops

	Introduction Joint and multiagency supported workshops NSF NASA DARPA Upcoming workshops
Introduction	Federal agency workshops bring together researchers and technical experts from the university, commercial, and Federal laboratory communities to share information on the latest developments in technical and applications areas and foster, in real time, science discipline and interdisciplinary collaborations. The workshops provide a venue where technology users express their requirements to the technology developers, helping to keep technology development aligned with research needs. Workshops are also crucial to generate collaborative testbeds to prototype developing technologies, refine standards in an operational environment, and transition technology to the commercial sector.   As an example of Federal workshop dynamics, in FY 1999, with support from NSF and NASA, the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board of the National Academy of Sciences began a study of Federal information services, concentrating on two focus areas, Federal statistics and emergency management and response. A workshop on the latter topic occurred in December 1998, with a workshop on the former topic occurring in February 1999. The study will complete its report in late FY 1999.   Numerous Federal workshops have occurred during the past year, and many more are planned. The following is a representative sampling of recent or planned workshops:
Joint and multiagency supported workshops	The 2nd Conference on "Enabling Technologies for Peta(fl)ops Computing," sponsored by DARPA, DOE, NASA, NSA, NSF, and NIH, was held in Santa Barbara, California February 15-19, 1999. The California Institute of Technology and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory jointly organized this conference, which followed a series of in-depth workshops and sponsored studies conducted to explore the factors that will determine the ultimate path to realizing petaflops capability and the means of effectively using it. The purpose of this second conference was to establish a community-wide consensus on the state and understanding of petaflops-scale computing approaches and determine directions for future research leading to practical petaflops performance systems. The four-day conference involved experts from a broad interdisciplinary community to provide in-depth coverage of a wide range of issues and foster detailed discussion across conventional discipline boundaries. More than 100 scientists and engineers from government, academic institutions, and computing industries participated in this successful conference.   The "National Workshop on Advanced Scientific Computation" was jointly sponsored by DOE and NSF and was held at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C., on July 30-31, 1998. The goal of the workshop was to examine promising high end scientific computation, simulation, and modeling, particularly for large scale and extraordinarily complex systems and processes. Additionally, the workshop was designed to address and outline the importance of next generation capabilities in science and engineering to academic, governmental, and industrial organizations.
NSF	Supported by NSF, the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board in collaboration with the Committee on National Statistics of the National Research Council held a "Workshop on Information Technology Research for Federal Statistics" on February 9-10, 1999, in Washington, D.C. Panel topics included "Information Technology Trends and Opportunities," "Study Design, Data Collection, and Data Processing," and "Creating Statistical Information Products." Another panel explored case histories with a goal of informing workshop participants about the processes used by the Federal statistical agencies to conduct their studies.   An NSF "Workshop on Middleware" was held at the Allen Conference Center on Northwestern University's Evanston, Illinois, campus on December 3-4, 1998. It was co-sponsored by Northwestern University-Evanston and Cisco. This workshop addressed developing an acceptable definition for networking middleware, identifying core components for a networking middleware infrastructure layer, and identifying needed research on components and their involvement in a networking testbed.   "Planning the Next Stage of NSF Advanced Networking Research and Development" was an NSF workshop co-sponsored by Educause in August, 1998. The goal of this workshop was to achieve a degree of consensus on the issues and opportunities that confront the NSF advanced networking program in the near term. It developed community input on the best general directions for follow-on programs and provided recommendations to NSF's ANIR on how to structure its post-vBNS program. More information can be found in the Educause report at:   http://www.educause.edu/netatedu/contents/reports/postvbnsrec981116.html   "Guidelines for NSF Networking Initiatives in the 21st Century" was an NSF workshop co-sponsored by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, on February 22-23, 1999. This workshop captured community input to produce a publicly available report summarizing visions of the future of NSF's ANIR programs following the present vBNS generation. A similar NSF-supported workshop on the "Post-vBNS Program for PACI" was held on February 17-19, 1999, in San Diego, California. Both workshops provided inputs from the general science and university research community, and will be followed by a similar workshop in the spring of 1999.   During the past year, NSF workshops also included "Research Priorities in Electronic Commerce," Austin, Texas, September 10-12, 1998; "Workshop on Distributed Information, Computation, and Process Management (DICPM) for Scientific and Engineering Environments," Herndon, Virginia, May 15-16, 1998; "1998 Information and Data Management Program Workshop," Washington, D.C., March 29-30, 1998; "NSF Workshop on Interfaces to Scientific Data Archives (ISDA'98)," Pasadena, California, March 24-27, 1998; "NSF Workshop on Information Retrieval Tools," Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, March 20-21, 1998; "NSF Workshop on Managing and Mining Massive Data (M3D-98)," LaJolla, California, February 5-6, 1998; and "Digital Libraries Initiative All Project Meeting," Berkeley, California, January 5-6, 1998.
NASA	The NASA-sponsored "IEEE Frontiers '99 Conference," held February 21-25, 1999, in Annapolis, Maryland, provided a forum for exploring technical issues driving the outer boundaries of effective high performance computing. This conference provided a forum for the Federal information technology community in the Washington, D.C., area to share their latest findings in the area of high end computing, information, and communications. The spectrum of fields addressed by the Frontiers conferences includes applications and algorithms, system software and languages, component technologies, and system architectures.   As an introduction to ISE concepts, NASA hosted a series of demonstrations to help illustrate select aspects of the ISE vision on December 9-11, 1998, at NASA Headquarters. The focus was on geographically-distributed collaboration and advanced human-computer interfaces and interactions (that is, immersive, interactive interfaces and interactions) for advanced visualization of engineering processes -- spanning mission conceptualization through operations -- as well as visualization of science data that might be produced from a future mission. Though only a subset of the broader ISE vision, these demonstrations highlighted some of the emerging ISE technologies.   Examples of some of the demonstrations included: a collaborative, immersive demonstration of a Space Station assembly flight with four interactive, "virtual" Extra Vehicular Activity (EVA) crew members represented by an audience member at Headquarters (in a head-mounted display) and personnel from Langley Research Center in Virginia, Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama, and Ames Research Center in California; a collaborative demonstration of a Space Station Intra Vehicular Activity (IVA) training scenario with individuals from Headquarters, Johnson Space Center in Texas, and Marshall Space Flight Center representing IVA crew members; a collaborative, interactive, 3-D visualization of a wind tunnel simulation; and interactive 3-D visualizations of a hurricane, a digital Earth, and a turbine engine.   At the "NASA Quality of Service Workshop," August 17-19, 1998, at NASA Ames Research Center, 18 technical papers reviewed the status of QoS technology and testbeds and provided recommendations for near-term extensions of QoS capabilities. A major result of the QoS workshop is the implementation of a multi-provider testbed to demonstrate DIFserve in the core network and RSVP for signaling at the edges of the network..
DARPA	A "Kickoff Workshop for the Principal Investigators of DARPA's Next Generation Internet Program (SuperNet) Awardees" was held on October 25-29, 1998, in Reston, Virginia. The focus of this workshop was on sharing new research ideas, discussing NGI SuperNet testbed deployment plans, and identifying synergies and collaborative opportunities across different projects. The workshop also provided a progress report for ongoing DARPA projects in its Broadband Information Technology Program. The meeting agenda, participants, and presentation topics are available at:   http://www.dyncorp-is.com/darpa/meetings/ngi98oct/agenda.html
Upcoming workshops	The purpose of the "Bridging the Gap from Networking Technologies to Applications" workshop co-sponsored by the NGI agencies, August 10-11, 1999, at Ames Research Center, California, will be to facilitate the transfer of next generation networking technologies to leading-edge revolutionary applications. Technologies of interest include QoS, scalable reliable multicast, audio/video/collaboration frameworks, and middleware. The workshop goal is to establish effective collaboration relationships and processes between the networking research and network applications communities so that applications are prepared to take advantage of forthcoming advanced networking technologies implemented over high performance networking testbeds (NREN, NISN, ESnet, DREN, vBNS, Abilene, SuperNet, CAIRN). This workshop will bring together researchers and developers from industry, academia, and government to identify, define, and discuss future directions in collaboration and problem-solving technologies in support of scientific research. R&D in collaboration environments and integration frameworks have produced theories and technologies that provide basic levels of support and functionality. The workshop will identify where the current research and technology needs to evolve towards an architecture that can meet the needs of scientific work.   In the spring of 1999, DOE and the University of California-Berkeley will co-sponsor a conference on "Integrated Collaborative Problem Solving for Scientific Research."