NPACI Holds First All-hands Meeting

January 21--In January 1998, NPACI held its first "all-hands" meeting. The two-day meeting brought together more than 200 participants from 43 institutions, including colleagues from the National Computational Science Alliance.

The goals of the meeting were to refine projects within and between thrust areas, focus efforts on milestones and deliverables for Year 1, and begin charting the organization's course for Year 2.

Two plenary sessions provided examples of how NPACI is coupling work of the technology thrust areas with work from the application thrusts. The Data-intensive Computing presentation focused on the Neuroscience thrust area's brain imaging collections and the Digital Sky project from Caltech, while Metasystems presented applications from the Earth Systems Science thrust area.

The afternoon of the first day was devoted to meetings of the nine thrust areas and the Resources Working Group and discussions of interthrust projects that had been identified prior to the meeting. The second day focused on how to build a common software infrastructure for NPACI. Tutorials were offered on data caches and SDSC's Storage Resource Broker, the Legion and Globus metasystems, compute-intensive problems in engineering, and KeLP.

The next major planned NPACI meeting will be a PACI Education, Outreach, and Training (EOT-PACI) meeting to be held jointly with the Alliance in Spring 1998. The goal of this meeting will be to team members of the national education community with leaders of the EOT-PACI program to ensure that EOT plans and activities address national educational needs.

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