YEAR 4 ACCOMPLISHMENTS -- C/C Support Team The Northeast Parallel Architectures Center (NPAC) at Syracuse University provides the team that supports the Collaboration and Communications, and closely related Training technology areas. The Syracuse team is lead by NPAC's Director, Prof. Geoffrey C. Fox, and draws as necessary on the wide range of C/C-related capabilities represented by the Center's research staff and students. Principal contributions to the support effort during Year 4 came from Dr David Bernholdt, the Tango Interactive Collaboratory Group headed by Dr Marek Podgorny, and Dr Tom Haupt in the area of commodity-based distributed high-performance computing. The NPAC team focuses on tracking, developing, and adapting the latest technologies and ideas for use in the Modernization Program, while day-to-day C/C operations, such as the PET web site and the Tango Interactive server are handled by Nichols Research on-site staff. Year 4 Effort NPAC's efforts in this area encompass not just Collaboration and Communication per se, but also the closely related area of tools and technologies for training and education. The NPAC team is also involved in analogous support activities in the ARL MSRC and ASC MSRC PET programs, as well as having a modest involvement in distance training and education activities in conjunction with the NAVO MSRC PET program. These additional connections provide a great deal of synergy with ERDC-sponsored C/C activities. As in the past, our work this year has been dominated by work on tools and techniques for remote collaboration, training, education, and distributed computing. But we are beginning to think about theses ideas different. The concept of "portals" has recently emerged in the Internet community at large as sites that provide gateways to a variety of tools and resources connected by a given theme. In the context of the Modernization Program, "computing portals" and "education (training) portals" are two areas of definite interest. A "computing portal" is typically designed as a three-tier system in which a user front-end is linked to a set of "back-end" software and computing resources through a collection of middleware. They are intended to facilitate the development and use of complex software systems in a network-based computing environment. These environments are becoming increasingly popular in part because there now exist a variety of powerful commodity technologies which facilitate the development and implementation of such portals: HTTP and web browsers, Java, CORBA (common object request broker architecture), XML (extensible markup language), etc. These ideas and technologies are at the heart of our work with the ERDC Coastal and Hydraulics Lab on the Land Management System (LMS). LMS integrates a number of existing (legacy) modeling and visualization tools into a unified environment which allows the user interface, database access for input data, and computational resources to be run in distributed fashion over the network. It also facilitates coupling multiple modeling applications into a "meta-application" without the need to modify the legacy codes involved. Extending our work of last year, when we produced a prototype LMS system based on a previous generation of technologies, the system has now been reimplemented using a commodity Java/CORBA/HTTP/XML environment. The framework has also been generalized to facilitate the incorporation of additional simulation packages, visualization tools, and input data sources. Portals for education and training, like those for computing, are typically thought of in terms of individual users and at best "asynchronous" collaboration between portal users -- interactions which don't require the parties involved to be online simultaneously, such as e-mail or web-based discussion forums. However our extensive work on synchronous collaboration and education over the past several years has given us insights into how portals might be made collaborative (both asynchronously and synchronously) in an incremental fashion and extended to interact with a wider range of access devices according to the requirements and limitations of both the device and the user. One such project undertaken this year involved the linking of handheld personal digital assistant devices (i.e. Palm IIIx, and Casio E-100) to the Tango Interactive collaboratory system in order to study how mobile access to computing and education portals might be facilitated. Other work on collaboration, and especially interactive synchronous distance learning continues to focus on the Tango Interactive collaboratory tools. Tango Interactive is a framework that allows sharing of applications across the Internet. It includes a suite of tools useful for basic collaboration and distance learning activities: shared web browser, chat, whiteboard, audio/video conferencing, shared text editor, etc. It also provides an application program interface (API) that allows other applications to be hooked into the Tango framework. Continuing our collaboration with PET partner Jackson State University (JSU), we have expanded our distance education offerings to include additional sites. This year's offerings, the fifth and sixth semester-long academic credit courses offered over the network using Tango, were received not only by JSU, but also by Morgan State University (involved in the ARL and NAVO PET programs), Mississippi State University (another PET partner), all four MSRCs, and NRL-DC, reaching an unprecedented number of students. Training events using Tango have also become part of the mainstream of the ERDC PET Training program, providing a mechanism to reach more users and reduce travel. Our experiences with Tango Interactive in interactive synchronous distance education/training, as well as collaboration will also factor into future work on collaborative education and computing portals.