There is general expectation that computational science will make increasing and 
critical use of distributed heterogeneous metacomputing environments. However this 
implies the development and integration of new technologies from several different 
disciplines and their testing on complex applications. In this proposal we bring together 
experts from distributed computing, virtual environments, high speed networking and 
web based collaboration. These are integrated in terms of carefully chosen applications 
with which we will be able to motivate and assess the technology base. We believe that 
any successful system must be able to harness multiple distributed computers, data 
analysis and visualization subsystems as well as a distributed team of users. This requires 
a multidisciplinary approach in any successful approach to this problem. This scenario 
can be expected both for academic applications (as seen today in nationally distributed 
Grand Challenges) and for Industrial problems as envisaged in multidisciplinary analysis 
and design for next generation manufacturing. We bring in ARMS (Cornell) an advanced 
metacomputing resource management tool which has already been designed to handle 
both compute and visualization systems. The latter will span virtual environments from 
advanced CAVE capabilities at Cornell and Houston as well as conventional workstation 
based analysis. TANGOsim (Syracuse) is a recently developed Java Server based 
collaborative environment which includes an event driven simulator with the 
conventional services offered in comparable systems offered by NCSA(Habanero)and 
IBM. TANGOsim links applications written in any language. It can be integrated 
naturally with the compute services offered by ARMS which is also based on a similar 
Web Technology base. These base technologies will be tied together with industrial 
(medical, seismic and manufacturing) and academic applications involving all members 
of the proposal team. We have included a strong networking research group from Cornell 
which will allow us to assess the results of effort from application, computing and 
networking perspectives. We believe that we have put together a team which combines 
leading edge expertise and technologies in the many diverse components needed in future 
distributed metacomputing environments. Further in each case, base technologies 
(ARMS, TANGOsim, virtual environments) are well developed and this proposal will 
only fund their integration.