Project Title: Enabling Technologies Team B "Tools for Heterogeneous Distributed 
Computing"
Principal Investigator: Geoffrey Fox
Organization: Northeast Parallel Architectures Center(NPAC)
		Syracuse University
		111 College Place
		Syracuse New York 13244-4100
Electronic Mail: gcf@npac.syr.edu Phone:3154432163
Partnership: Illinois(NCSA)

Proposed Activities: NPAC will contribute components of Web-based computing 
infrastructure. We refer collectively to NPAC activities in this area as HyperWorld, and 
we will work with the Alliance application and technology groups to optimally integrate 
our work to produce Alliance Infrastructure.
HyperWorld is a compound of Web technologies, tools and applications that will act as a 
uniform 'software bus' or middleware for heterogeneous distributed computing. The 
central tier-2 layer of this 3-tier architecture is given by a mesh of interconnected Java 
HTTP servers (such as Jigsaw by W3C or Jeeves by JavaSoft) that manage a collection of 
servlets. We will also link with the NCSA Habanero project which is the natural 
collaboratory resource in our Java computing system. The overall concept of the 
HyperWorld infrastructure was developed in our early ('94) WebTools prototype. 
Individual functions of the HyperWorld infrastructure such as dataflow based coarse-
grain distributed computing (WebFlow), collaboratory environments (WebSpace), system 
management for metacomputing (MetaWeb), or virtual environments (Televirtuality) are 
being now prototyped based on focused projects funded by IBM, DoE and USAF. The 
Web and HPCC are moving so fast that we can predict very precisely now what will be 
the most important way we can help the Alliance a year from now! We do follow Web 
technology advances very closely and will evolve our activities to match new advances 
and use PACI funds to deliver according to application requirements, reasonably robust 
systems such as WebFlow to the Alliance for testing and evaluation. Applications such as 
the Biology Workbench and Vis5D are natural delivery points for our technology.

Affect on Infrastructure: we intend to use PACI funds to deliver Web computing tools 
to be tested by PACI partners. This will be based on research prototypes produced with 
ongoing industrial and federal funding. We believe Web software provides a high 
functionality base for distributed computing which will be needed to meet the alliance 
goals.

Difference from Current Activities: The proposed project involves development of 
robust software which is not funded by any other project at NPAC.

Explanation of Cost Sharing: The cost sharing is 1:1 using three sources – University 
funding of Fox’s salary and tuition waiver, the state funded InfoMall activities as well 
NPAC computer resources used for initial prototyping work.