The HPCMP is providing defense scientists and engineers with enabling HPC technology critical to science and technology (S&T) and development, testing and evaluation (DT&E) of new weapons and capabilities needed by tomorrow's warfighter. Researchers at CRPC sites Caltech, Rice University, Syracuse University, the University of Tennessee and the University of Texas are lending their expertise to various components of the program.

The HPCMP established four Major Shared Resource Centers (MSRCs) to provide a broad range of HPC services to DoD laboratories, computational scientists, and DT&E centers. Thirteen distributed centers also were established to augment the MSRCs by leveraging the HPC expertise that exists at these sites for the benefit of the entire program and to address unique requirements that cannot be met by MSRCs. The Defense Research and Engineering Network (DREN) is a high-speed network that links computational scientists and engineers at DoD laboratories and test centers with high-end computing resources located at the DoD computational centers. The network provides high-speed communications supporting collaborative work environments.

The Programming Environment and Training (PET) initiative, in which the CRPC is primarily involved, provides DoD users with expert HPC advice and support from the country's leading academic and industry experts. Collaborative support efforts include user training tailored to specific interests and needs, as well as software environments and tool development to provide a common look and feel across DoD sites and computer platforms.

The June 1999 Users Conference featured numerous plenary talks, panels, posters, and presentations on such diverse subjects as metacomputing, naval weather forecasting, scientific visualization, infrastructure, ocean modeling, PET topics, and the future role of HPC. On June 8, CRPC researchers Clay Breshears of Rice University and Shirley Brown of the University of Tennessee presented, "Scalable Performance Analysis Using Dynamic Instrumentation and Virtual Reality Immersion" during Poster Session 1. On June 9, CRPC researcher Geoffrey Fox of Syracuse University and colleagues presented, "The Gateway Project: An Interoperable Problem Solving Environments Framework for High Performance Computing," during Poster Session 2.

For the complete agenda and more information about the conference, see http://www.hpcmo.hpc.mil/Htdocs/UGC/index.html.