"Overview of the I-WAY: Wide Area Visual Supercomputing"

Overview of the I-WAY: Wide Area Visual Supercomputing

DeFanti, T., Foster I., Papka, M.E., Stevens, R., Kuhfuss, T.

• Link: https://doi.org/10.1177/109434209601000201
• PDF: 1996-overview-of-the-i-way_wide-area-visual-supercomputing.pdf

Logical Map of the I-WAY Credit: Richard Foster and Linda Winkler, ANL, 1996

This paper discusses the I-WAY project and provides an overview of the papers in this issue of IJSA. The I-WAY is an experimental environment for building distributed virtual reality applications and for exploring issues of distributed wide area resource management and scheduling. The goal of the I-WAY project is to enable researchers use multiple internetworked supercomputers and advanced visualization systems to conduct very large-scale computations. By connecting a dozen ATM testbeds, seventeen supercomputer centers, five virtual reality research sites, and over sixty applications groups, the I-WAY project has created an extremely diverse wide area environment for exploring advanced applications. This environment has provided a glimpse of the future for advanced scientific and engineering computing.