Hi -- Thanks a lot for your "Quantum Care Package". As a Physics Ph.D., I found 
it reasonably easy to read and think I understand science issues reasonably well. In fact I 
am currently working on Path Integral formulations of economic modeling with a couple 
of small companies through our technology transfer organization InfoMall. My colleague 
Wojtek Furmanski, copied on this note, is also a Physics Ph.D. who has drifted into 
computer/computational science.
I believe that our mutual PACI goal is to take your application area and explore 
the value of new Web Technologies to produce an enhanced computational environment. 
Sometimes this is called a domain specific Problem Solving Environment. We could 
compare to Biology Workbench that is, I think, very successful. We would use somewhat 
more advanced and speculative Web technologies as a prototype of approaches that could 
be deployed more broadly. 
If you look at the Web site you have browsed (which now has papers from latest 
June 21 meeting online), one can see the following possibilities:
1) Java as the language to code Applications -- Native compilers with high 
performance are not yet available but will be quite soon. I am for instance, 
coding my economic modeling application in Java.
2) Java applets for education where performance is less critical than nifty client 
side capabilities
3) Java applets for visualization (see paper by Scott Klasky from NPAC (link 
from June 21 meeting or NPAC Home page where he is using this in 
numerical relativity grand challenge)
4) Linkage of multiple application programs and visualization as a Problem 
Solving Environment. Here we are developing WebFlow which should be 
nicely available for PACI time scale (I assume October 1 formal start date)
5) Collaborative systems such as Habanero from NCSA or Tango from NPAC. 
These link multiple clients (i.e. people) together with server side applications 
which would be controlled by systems such as WebFlow.

I may be mistaken, but my guess is that 3) 4) and later 5) are natural areas to start 
exploring!