COMPUTATIONAL SCIENCE HIGHLIGHTS AVAILABLE ON WORLD WIDE WEB

The National Science Foundation (NSF) announced today the availability of
Computational Science Highlights, the National MetaCenter's repository of
multimedia science articles, on the World Wide Web (WWW). Articles in this
repository demonstrate the impact that high-performance computing
supported by the NSF is having on scientific progress and the quality of
day-to-day living.

Computational Science Highlights can be accessed via the World Wide Web at
the any of the following addresses:

 http://www.tc.cornell.edu/Research/MetaScience/,
 http://www.ucar.edu/METASCI/Welcome/welcome.html,
 http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SCMS/Metascience/Home/welcome.html,
 http://pscinfo.psc.edu/MetaCenter/MetaScience/welcome.html,   or
 http://www.sdsc.edu/MetaScience/welcome.html.

Computational Science Highlights covers topics at all scales of scientific
inquiry. Stories feature: modeling blood flow in the human heart;
simulating the behavior of cancer genes and enzyme/inhibitor complexes
vital to the design of new drugs; the Shoemaker-Levy comet's impact on
Jupiter; and the discovery of the first planet known to exist outside of
our solar system. Browsers will also find information on both Pacific and
Atlantic Ocean systems, including a high-resolution animation of the
general circulation of the North Atlantic.

Users have the option to browse the repository's contents or to search for
articles by keyword, such as researcher last name or institution.
Computational Science Highlights , a prototype system, currently contains
articles contributed by the members of the National MetaCenter: the
Cornell Theory Center (CTC), the National Center for Atmospheric Research
(NCAR), the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA),
Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC), and San Diego Supercomputer Center
(SDSC). MetaCenter activities such as this repository are joint efforts of
the five NSF Supercomputer Centers along with other centers that naturally
overlap in research and technology interests.

Supported by the NSF, the development of the Computational Science
Highlights repository was a logical extension of the integrated online
information system of the National MetaCenter (MetaInfo) and part of the
NSF Mosaic Deployment Project. Work focused on creating search and browse
technologies for a distributed multimedia information resource. The
complete software package, MetaSoft, is fully documented and can be
downloaded from the Computational Science Highlights welcome page by
anyone interested in setting up a similar system.

Through a shared indexing system, the Centers have combined their
illustrated science features and made them accessible via the World Wide
Web. The growing sophistication of the Web as accessed through graphical
browsers such as NCSA Mosaic allows the articles to be enhanced with sound
and animation.

The distributed system allows documents to be developed and maintained at
the individual centers while access through both the search and browse
engines is available through the Web servers at all collaborating
supercomputing centers. This distributed document system is extensible so
that new information can be added easily and other institutions (for
example, highperformance computing and communications centers at the state
and regional level such as the MetaCenter Regional Alliances) can
participate. Moreover, the structure might be used by others to build
similar, but unrelated, repositories.

"I am really pleased at the repository's ability to convey some of the
excitement of NSF's computational science activities, through text but
also through images, sounds, and movies," says Lawrence E. Brandt, NSF
program manager for advanced scientific computing. "The ability to reach
thousands of individuals directly on the Web is a big plus over our
previous print publications. I expect that the repository will be
maintained and extended over time, with technical enhancements and new
contributors beyond the five NSF supercomputing centers which have kicked
off the project."

For further information on implementation of a custom repository using the
software developed in this project, contact Joshua Polterock, Senior
Technical Editor, SDSC: joshuap@sdsc.edu.

 ============================================================
 From the  'New Product News'  Electronic News Service on....
 AOL (Keyword = New Products) & Delphi (GO COMPUTING PRODUCT)
 ============================================================
 This information was processed from data provided by the 
 company or author mentioned. For additional details, please 
 contact them directly at the address/phone number indicated.
 All trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
 ============================================================
 All submissions for this service should be addressed to:
 BAKER ENTERPRISES,  20 Ferro Dr,  Sewell, NJ  08080  U.S.A.
 Email: RBakerPC (AOL/Delphi), rbakerpc@delphi.com (Internet)
 ============================================================
