From the Program Manager

Dr. William J. Feiereisen
Program Manager, High Performance Computing and Communications Program
National Aeronautics and Space Administration
NASA Ames Research Center
Moffett Field, California

Issue 4, January 1998

Text Only F E A T U R E S >Focusing radar's lens >Cooperative Research Agreement Spurs Industry Change >VLAB-Virtual Simulation Lab of the Future _______________________ I N - B R I E F >NASA HPCC News __________________________ A R C H I V E S >INSIGHTS VOL 2 >INSIGHTS VOL 3 __________________________

Insights is published by the High Performance Computing and Communications (HPCC) Program Office. To receive a hard copy of Insights or request an address change contact Judy Conlon or write to: NASA HPCC Insights, Mail Stop 269-3, Moffett Field, California 94035-1000, USA

Over the next few months the Computational Aerosciences project (CAS) will begin to join forces with a part of NASA's Information Technology program, formerly known as NAS, in order to study "distributed heterogeneous computing." In our work over the last few years, it has become evident that networks play an increasingly greater role in the access to supercomputing to the point that we can now envision a web of computers tied together in a seamless fabric. You can imagine the day when computing and information access could be as simple and uniform as our access to electrical power is now.

This motivates the label that we've given this project, the Information Power Grid (IPG). The process of aerospace design is becoming more geographically distributed and at the same time more compute intensive. The Information Power Grid mirrors these changes in aerospace computing by performing the research and developing the equivalent computing infrastructure upon which the design process of the future will run. Within IPG, we hope to continue the collaborative relationship with our aerospace partners that we built in the last six years of Computational Aerosciences.

I hope that you enjoy the articles that we have assembled for you in this issue.

Bill Feiereisen
wfeiereisen@mail.arc.nasa.gov