BOSTON UNIVERSITY BECOMES CRPC AFFILIATED SITE

The CRPC's strong research efforts in the area of World Wide Web technologies by Geoffrey Fox and fellow researchers at Syracuse University have resulted in the naming of collaborator Boston University as the fifth CRPC affiliated site. Marina Chen, computer science professor and emeritus member of the CRPC External Advisory Committee, serves as affiliated site leader at Boston University (see "Parallel Profile," page 6).

"Marina Chen has been a leader in the High Performance Computing Community for many years," says Fox. "In addition, Boston University has one of the very best computational science efforts in the nation and its linked strengths in computer and computational science fit very well with the CRPC. I look forward to increased collaboration stemming from Boston's, and in particular Marina's, stronger ties with the CRPC."

Chen has collaborated with Fox and Syracuse CRPC researcher Wojtek Furmanski on a variety of Web-related projects, most recently metacomputing software. In 1995, she worked with Fox, Furmanski, Arjen Lenstra and Sandeep Bhatt of Bellcore, and Jim Cowie of Cooperating Systems on the RSA-130 factoring project. The RSA-130 project won the High-Performance Computing Challenge Award for Most Geographically Dispersed and Heterogeneous Factoring on the World-Wide Computer in the Teraflop Challenge contest at Supercomputing '95. The group is currently working on the WebFlow project, an extension of this work. (For more information, see http://www.crpc.rice.edu/CRPC/newsletters/spr96/resfocus.html.)

According to Chen, the Computer Science Department at Boston University has established strong research in Web-related areas, including realtime metacomputing; middleware solutions such as caching, prefetching, and replication for wide-area information systems; and advanced content-based search techniques for graphical images. In addition, Chen collaborates with researchers and has access to the supercomputing resources at the university's Center for Computational Science, which has developed and promoted highly parallel computing since 1988.

"I am very honored to represent Boston University and have the opportunity to continue and broaden our collaboration," Chen says. "The CRPC is unique in that it brings together researchers of diverse expertise and background to create projects with common, shared goals. The center serves as a model to manage and develop the human resources in the most strategic areas of advanced computing."

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