Trip Report for ITEA HPC Conference (http://www.arl.hpc.mil/itea/) The International Test and Evaluation Association (ITEA) Workshop on High Performance Computing in Support of Test and Evaluation (T&E)was sponsored by the Francis Scott Key Chapter of ITEA and hosted by ARL, HPCMPO and TECOM. The two-day workshop, preceeded by a tutorial day and followed by a trip to the Aberdeen Proving Ground, was held in Aberdeen, MD on July 13-16, 1998 and it attracted some 150 participants. The goal of the workshop was to bring together the HPC and T&E communities within the DoD and to start working jointly towards new HPC T&E environments for: a) Simulation Based Acquisiton (SBA); b) Information Management; and c) Networking and Distributed Operations. These three domains were covered by the three major plenary (mornings) and parallel (afternoons) sessions of the workshop. SBA was viewed as the main driving force and the eventual application goal of the HPC/T&E integration, with the other two domains playing the role of supporting core technologies. There were also general presentations on major federal programs including the DoD modernization activity. There was a warm welcome from the local community describing the economic vitality of the region. Several high ranking government officials were invited and presented their perspectives on possible avenues towards the SBA. Pat Sanders, Director of Test Systems Engineering and Evaluation, Pentagon, compared the coming SBA revolution to the transportation breakthrough during the industrial revolution - people were traveling with the same average (horse) velocity for centuries but then everything changed abruptly in the 19th century after the rapid onset of new technologies. Phil Coyle III, Director, Operational Test and Evaluation, Pentagon, stressed, however, that in order to succeed, DoD SBA vision needs some better focus and programmatic time scale or a "nexus" between the time required to develop next generation HPC + T&E systems and the time horizon of the coming real need for the associated SBA applications. Coyle pointed out the DoE ASCI program as an example of a well-focused government program with both the vision and the programmatic time nexus in place. The luncheon talk "Modeling and Simulation: Facing Reality" by James F. O'Bryon, Deputy Director, OT&E Live Fire Testing, Pentagon, given during the Aberdeen Proving Ground Tour on the last workshop day, tried to propose some specific near term action items. O'Bryon stated clearly that there is no new money for SBA. However, he also pointed out that Modeling and Simulation represents some 10% i.e. a huge chunk of the DoD software development budget - but it is dispersed over a few hundred program offices which keep rediscovering the same M&S wheels over and over again. He acknowledged DMSO role and declared himself as 'HLA-positive' but he also suggested that DMSO should not try to become 'Bill Gates of DoD' as per the current ongoing process. According to O'Bryon, DMSO should concentrate on developing specifications for interoperability standards like HLA, whereas the actual implementation of a modular reusable M&S software infrastructure should be addressed by a new Alliance to be formed and funded by taxing the M&S budgets in all existing programs. Some plenary or technical talks presented during the conference were in fact indicating that some trends towards the M&S software coalitions are emergent or already in process. One example and already a success story is the NPARC Alliance in the CFD domain, formed by Arnold AFB, TN, NASA LeRC and Boeing. NPARC maintains and freely distributes production quality general-purpose Navier-Stokes code, capable to handle inviscid or viscous, laminar or turbulent, steady-state or transient flows. This code is being now integrated with Boeing's NASTD code towards the new WIND system that is expected to realize the Alliance mission of developing, validating and supporting a general purpose computational flow simulator for the US aerospace community. Other early success stories in the area of matching the HPC capabilities with the T&E needs were reported by the Naval Air Warfare Canter Aircraft Division at Patuxent River, MD (where the current focus is on advanced networking infrastructure to support high end flight simulator and related HPC T&E tasks) and by the ARL MSRC (where the first results were reported on the HPC/ImmersaDesk based visualization of a liquid tanker, sending real-time sensory signals from the T&E operation field to the HPC facilities) FMS CTA was represeted by the CHSSI talk by Bob Wasilausky, summarizing the status of the ongoing FMS-2,3,4,5 projects, and by a set of four FMS PET talks presented by NPAC and discussing aspects of Web/Commodity technologies of relevance for the SBA and the HPC/T&E integration. These papers are online at: http://tapetus.npac.syr.edu/iwt98/pm/documents/itea98/authoring.doc http://tapetus.npac.syr.edu/iwt98/pm/documents/itea98/directplay.doc http://tapetus.npac.syr.edu/iwt98/pm/documents/itea98/owrti.doc http://tapetus.npac.syr.edu/iwt98/pm/documents/itea98/db.doc NPAC's FMS message was that the WebHLA framework under development that merges the new DoD (HLA) and Web/Commodity (CORBA,Java,COM) standards, offers a promising open platform to attack the SBA software challenges. WebHLA's rich mix of commodity technolfy with an event driven computational model appears to make it an attractive candidate as a general metasystem (grid) environment. The full range of FMS training material collected by NPAC, will be found at http://bombay.npac.syr.edu/fms/ Our tutorial on the first day (http://www.npac.syr.edu/projects/training/ITEA98) was devoted to the object web covering databases and CORBA and could be viewed as the basic technology framework for WebHLA. NPAC gave several examples illustrating different approaches in technical report database; Web site document and access management and visualization; Web Search robot database backend; Lotus Notes calendar; Student records and course database; Virtual University curriculum manager. These quite well developed applications were supplemented by "technology nuggets" including Cold Fusion, CORBA and RMI Collaboration as well NPAC's JWORB combined Web CORBA and COM server. This linkage of FMS, InfoComm and Training CTA's was completed by a NPAC technical paper on the use of TangoInteractive in training and command and control as a model for T&E use. This technology was part of a small exhibit room where we were kindly hosted by the DoD Modernization stand. The links for this are: http://trurl.npac.syr.edu/tango http://www.npac.syr.edu/users/gcf/iteatutjuly98/tangoiteajuly98/index.html http://www.npac.syr.edu/users/gcf/iteatango