Opportunities and Tools for Highly Interactive Distributed and Parallel Computing

Advances in networking, visualization and parallel computing signal the end of the days of batch-mode processing for computationally intensive applications. The ability to control and interact with these applications in real-time offers both opportunities and challenges. This paper examines two computationally intensive scientific applications and discusses the ways in which more interactivity in their computations presents opportunities for gain. It briefly examines the requirements for systems trying to exploit these opportunities and discusses Falcon, a system that attempts to fulfill these requirements