NPAC Activities in Distributed Computing
NPAC's work in networked systems has a strong application focus although it 
involves development of important generic technology. The two major application areas 
are distance learning and distributed simulation. Our work in each case is with major 
national consortia. These include the NCSA Computational Science partnership; the 
CRPC Center for Research in Parallel Computation; and the DoD Modernization 
Program. We also lead the forum on the use of Java for High Performance Networked 
Computing, which involves both a standards setting process and a sequence of very 
successful workshops. 
Activity in Distance Learning (http://www.webwisdom.org and 
http://www.npac.syr.edu/Education )
This involves education with this semester, NPAC teaching a regular course 
remotely at Jackson State University in Mississippi. This uses our novel Tango 
collaborative environment, which allows simultaneous support of both synchronous (real-
time student teacher interactions) and asynchronous learning. This has both audio-video 
conferencing and digital video server technology integrated in it and can be used for 
interesting tests of the value of RTP, RSVP or more generally quality of service network 
technologies. Tango is currently the only full function multi-language collaboration 
system and is also being applied to Crisis Management -- an area where again integration 
of networking and applications is very valuable. Our work in training is in support of the 
DoD Modernization program and involves 3 sites (ARL, ASC and CEWES) and again 
involves Tango linked to web-linked databases for asynchronous learning. Here we 
ensure our work conforms to the new DOD and OSTP ADL (Advanced Distance 
Learning) initiative developing standards for distributed objects used in education.

Activity in Distributed Simulation ( 
http://www.npac.syr.edu/Projects/WebSimulation/ and 
http://www.npac.syr.edu/users/gcf/HPcc/HPcc.html )
Here our work has several components unified by a common technology approach 
based on building systems from commodity technologies (Web and CORBA) which 
gives automatically high functionality but then requires research into achieving high 
performance with this approach. Highlights of this activity include HPJava which builds 
high level support into Java for large scale scientific and engineering computation and is 
based on linking Java to a high performance library built with Darpa support. WebFlow 
uses a network of integrated Java and CORBA servers to support large scale distributed 
coarse grain software integration. This is being used both in classic scientific 
computations with NCSA and in the Forces Modeling activity of the DOD Modernization 
program at ARL (Aberdeen). With NCSA we are study'ing integration of our approach 
with Globus at the low level. We believe that our approach is particularly relevant for this 
proposal as it based on using the commercial approaches of today's modest performance 
networks and enhancing them to achieve high performance.