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The group collective experience covered a number of applications areas
in science and engineering. From the summarised applications list in
section A, we identified the following interesting
characteristics of scientific and engineering applications:
- computational performance - either FLOPS or just OPS in some cases;
- data storage access rates - MByte/s;
- data communications transfer speeds - Mbit/s;
- target range of platforms - and changing targets;
- number of separate disciplines needed in development team;
- size of software effort to develop and build needed software;
- size of software effort to maintain software;
- economic model for developing software - who pays and why.
These characteristics arose time and again in many of the HPCC
vignettes the group discussed (see section 4. A key
issue was that HPCC software should be well engineered just the same
as software for conventional platforms is if it is to be suited for
use in industry and commerce.
Geoffrey Fox, Northeast Parallel Architectures Center at Syracuse University, gcf@npac.syr.edu