NPAC Technical Report SCCS-732
The Use of the National Information Infrastructure and High Performance Computers in Industry
Geoffrey Fox, Wojtek Furmanski
Submitted July 1 1995
Abstract
We divide potential NII (National Information Infrastructure) services into
five broad areas: Collaboration and
televirtuality; InfoVISiON (Information, Video, Imagery, and Simulation on
Demand), and digital libraries;
commerce; metacomputing; WebTop productivity services. The latter denotes
the broad suite of tools we expect to
be offered on the Web in a general environment we term WebWindows. We
review current and future World Wide
Web technologies, which could underlie these services. In particular, we
suggest an integration framework
WebWork for High Performance (parallel and distributed) computing and the
NII. We point out that pervasive
WebWork and WebWindows technologies will enable, facilitate and
substantially accelerate such complex
software processes on the NII.
We briefly analyze seven broad application areas: society; business
enterprises; health care; defense command
and control, and crisis management; education; collaboratory;
manufacturing. We contrast their use of NII
services with a more detailed examination of the manufacture of complex
systems, such as aircraft and
automobiles. This application will stress the NII, but there is a
remarkable opportunity to develop new
manufacturing practices that offer cost savings and reduced time to market.