High-performance computing and networking enables complex applications

Recent advances and rapid improvements in the computing and networking technologies have opened the doors to new demanding applications, both in the research and industry domains. The new technology support allows researchers and developers in the scientific, engineering, industry, and service sector to define their problems in their real dimensions and complexities, model the environment in order to have a better insight on complex problems, and propose solutions to the problems under study. Similarly, new opportunities for large-scale collaboration among enterprises are facilitated by massively distributed computing. For example, in physics, the need to support large-capacity, high-performance computing, and advanced storage systems has been identified in several technical papers and presentations. The amount of data generated, which also needs to be processed and analyzed, is growing extremely large. One example in this domain is the large hadron collider that CERN is planning to make operational in 2005, which will generate 5 peta bytes (PB) per year. Another example is bio-informatics, especially the DNA micro-array as a new emerging technology. Here also the amount of generated data is increasing exponentially. Moreover, the analysis of these data among other things requires the integration of data and data semantics (meta-data) from several heterogeneous information sources, which are geographically distributed all around the world. These and other requirements are the subject of focus in some virtual laboratory initiatives. Similarly, in the industry and service sectors, new business paradigms are emerging through the development of virtual communities and virtual enterprises where a number of autonomous, distributed, and heterogeneous nodes cooperate in order to jointly attend a business opportunity. Coordination and supervision of distributed activities, management of distributed/federated information, and proper handling of security and privacy issues are major requirements in these application areas. As these examples illustrate, the acquisition and analysis of these data, or problem solving in short, will greatly benefit from the high-performance computing and networking (HPCN) techniques and technologies of today, and even more in the near future. The HPCN conference series through its eight editions has established itself as a representative “promoter” as well as a “meeting point” for these trends. HPCN conferences traditionally cover a wide spectrum of advanced approaches and application areas, including support for research in fundamental areas of science such as physics and chemistry, as well as in biosciences, engineering, defense, weather forecast and modeling, simulation, and visualization. More recently, the scope of the conference was further expanded with an additional theme to emphasize the important requirements related to information management and the importance of the web-based cooperative/interoperable application infrastructures. This special issue of FGCS is based on selected contributions to the HPCN Europe 2000, which have been further improved and extended. Therefore, 15 selected significant papers cover the following areas of both computational and computer science: