I am grateful to Prof. Geoffrey Fox for his continuous support as my academic
advisor and NPAC director throughout this work. Without his generous commitment 
in allowing me to continue this thesis work while working at NPAC,
this thesis would not have been possible.

I would like to thank Dr. Marek Podgorny for introducing me to parallel
RDBMS and many useful discussions, Dr. Kim Mills for first giving
me opportunity to work in parallel applications.

Thanks to my colleagues, Dr. Yinhua Lu, Mr. Jay Mortensen, Dr. Ken
Hawick and Dr. Shennon Shen for help in the computational electromagnetics
projects,  Mr. Piotr So. in the Web search project, and Dr. Wojtek
Furmanski 
for his idea of WWWVM and WebFlow. I am also indebted to NPAC for providing
me with excellent computer infrastructure and systems support for this work.

I especially want to thank my uncle John Wu, who partially sponsored my entering to the 
States. Without his faithful support, I would have not pursue a higher academic
degree. Thanks also to Dr. Ann Shelly and Dr. Ernie Sibert who
assisted me to obtain the initial precious scholarship
from the University; to my friends, Dr. Xiangdong Yu, Dr. Xin Yi, Ms. Fang Fang
and Dr. Kang Cheng for their spiritual and moral support.

Special thanks to Prof. Nancy McCracken for her serving in my committee to take
care the departmental chores for me, and to Ms. Elaine Weinman for
editorial assistance.

Finally, my greatest thanks go to my lovely wife, Yang Meng, for
her patience, understanding and sacrifice.
