Date: Thu, 17 Dec 1998 00:36:40 GMT
From: David.W.Walker@cs.cf.ac.uk (David W Walker)
Subject: European Research Conference on PSEs

                      European Research Conference on
           Problem-Solving Environments: Infrastructure and Prototypes
                             12-17 June 1999
                       San Feliu de Guixols, Spain

Sponsors:

European Science Foundation
NEC Europe Ltd
Cardiff University

Objective:

The European Research Conferences bring together small groups of mainly 
European participants at the forefront of research for open, off-the-record 
discussions of current topics and problems, new ideas, and directions for 
future research. Further information about the European Research Conferences
may be found at www.esf.c-strasbourg.fr/euresco/active_c.htm

Overview:

A problem-solving environment (PSE) provides a complete 
integrated computing environment for composing, compiling, and running 
applications in a specific problem area. A PSE also incorporates many features
of an expert system, and provides extensive assistance to users in formulating
problems, running the problem on an appropriate computing platform, and viewing
and analysing the results. In addition, a PSE may have access to virtual 
libraries, sophisticated job control systems, and visualisation environments.
PSEs provide software tools and expert assistance to the user, and serve as an
easy-to-use interface to high performance computing resources, thereby allowing
the rapid prototyping of ideas, detailed analysis, and higher productivity. By
relieving the user of the burdens associated with the inessential details of 
specific hardware and software systems the PSE leaves the user free to 
concentrate on his or her particular problem. Although PSEs, such as Matlab and
Mathematica, are commercially available for fairly generic mathematical 
computations, few are available for more demanding computational science 
applications. In the future PSEs may be the main interface through which users 
access high performance computing resources. 

Topics:

We to give a broad interpretation to what is meant by a PSE. The conference 
will address not only PSEs themselves, but also the software infrastructure used 
to construct them. The topics to be covered include, but are not limited to, 
the following:

o Distributed environments for high performance computing
o Software infrastructure for distributed computing
o Problem-solving environments in science, industry, and commerce
o Mobile agents
o Load balancing and resource scheduling in distributed computing environments
o Knowledge discovery
o Visual programming environments
o Concurrent engineering
o Advanced visualisation techniques
o Computational steering
o Immersive virtual environments for the exploration of very large data sets
o The remote control of scientific instruments

Organising Committee:

David W. Walker (chair)      Cardiff University, UK
Rolf Hempel (vice-chair)     NEC Europe Ltd, Germany
Peter Brezany                University of Vienna, Austria
Karsten Decker               Swiss Center for Scientific Computing, Switzerland
Efstratios Gallopoulos       University of Patras, Greece
Wolfgang Gentzsch            Genias, Germany
Laurent Hascoet              INRIA, Sophia-Antipolis, France
Tony Hey                     Southampton University, UK
Bo Kagstrom                  University of Umea, Sweden
Domenico Laforenza           CNUCE-Institute of the Italian National Research Council
John Murphy                  British Aerospace
Karl Solchenbach             Pallas, Germany