| PC and workstation clusters are of growing important and this typically distributed memory people's technology is contrasted with distributed shared memory tightly coupled MPP's. |
| Computational science moving to multidisciplinary (multi-component) applications |
| Corresponding growing use of databases (for data-intensive applications) |
| Interoperability between disparate heterogeneous platforms, support of multidisciplinary applications, and metacomputing are three related important areas |
| "full metacomputing" (decompose general problem on general networked resources) may not be relevant |
| The Web is delivering a new operating environment (WebWindows) and a rich distributed computing software infrastructure with especially excellent support for software integration |
| There is a need for a new scalable technical operating system (NT v UNIX v WebWindows) |