NPAC Technical Report SCCS-757
An Application Perspective on High-Performance Computing and Communications
Geoffrey Fox
Submitted March 20 1996
Abstract
We review possible and probable industrial applications of HPCC
focusing on the software and hardware issues. Thirty-three separate
categories are illustrated by detailed descriptions of five
areas -- computational chemistry; Monte Carlo methods from physics to
economics; manufacturing, and computational fluid dynamics; command and
control, or crisis management; and multimedia services to client
computers and settop boxes. The hardware varies from tightly-coupled
parallel supercomputers to heterogeneous distributed systems. The
software models span HPF and data parallelism, to distributed
information systems and object/dataflow parallelism on the Web.
We find that in each case, it is reasonably clear that ``HPCC works in
principle,'' and postulate that this knowledge can be used in a new
generation of software infrastructure based on the WebWindows approach,
and discussed in an accompanying paper.