Of interest to SERIALST readers, perhaps?  -Birdie

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 27 Feb 1995 11:30:45 -0500
Subject: MetaCenter Computational Science Highlights (fwd)

***********  For Immediate Release  ************

Washington, DC. -- 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, high-performance 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.

 --

Contact:

Beth Gaston
Public Affairs Officer
National Science Foundation
 (703) 306 - 1070
egaston@nsf.gov