"I am all but speechless," wrote Web surfer Margaret Lashua. "What a terrific Web site. After three hours, I am just coming up for air [and lunch]. This is my nomination-no question about it-for Best Web Site of 1995."
Lashua's email message to Cornell Theory Center's Dan Dwyer praised the newest collaborative project among the five NSF supercomputing centers: an online repository of articles highlighting the centers' research. Accessible via the World Wide Web, NSF Computational Science Highlights is a growing collection of more than 130 technical papers, complete with images, animations, and sounds.
In just five months, an estimated 5,000 to 6,000 people have visited Computational Science Highlights and its eclectic offerings: blood flow in the human heart, behaviors of cancer genes vital to the design of new drugs, the Shoemaker-Levy 9 comet's impact on Jupiter, the discovery of the first planet known to exist outside of our solar system, ad infinitum. Users can browse the repository's hyperlinks or search the database by keyword.
The holdings feature work done at all five NSF centers: NCSA, Cornell Theory Center, National Center for Atmospheric Research, Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, and San Diego Supercomputer Center. Of the 130 articles online, close to 100 are from NCSA, according to NCSA Multimedia Technology Associate Cordelia Geiken, who with UIUC undergraduate programmer Doug Fein helped transfer the contents of NCSA's Digital Information System to the repository.
Geiken and Fein were part of the MetaCenter team that developed the repository concept, database searching, Web publishing software, and download protocols. Visual Research Programmer Jason Ng (Software Development Group) and Science Writer Holly Korab also assisted in the project from NCSA. Much of the project's coordination was carried out via the MetaCenter's videoteleconferencing facilities.
"We were interested in looking at ways to distribute the project results in such a way that each center could maintain control and responsibility of a single system," says Dwyer, project leader for Cornell's Online Information Systems Group.
"On one hand, we decided early on that it would be impractical to force each center to maintain the same design-it would be almost the same thing as trying to get everyone to agree on religion!" Geiken laughs. "On the other hand, each article needs to contain a set of key elements for the software to search." The challenge in developing the software for the system was not only in designing search engines, but in developing ways to coordinate downloads from each of the five centers.
Participants in the repository project agreed that the experience serves as a good demonstration of how the MetaCenter can collaborate. "Because we didn't have a centralized overseeing body, we developed the repository through a consensus process. Sometimes this was slow, but I think the repository project is an example of how well this kind of common-ground decision-making can work," Dwyer says.
Informally, the centers have continued to add papers to the repository, according to Dwyer. In addition, many of the NSF MetaCenter Regional Alliances have expressed interest in downloading their articles to the repository.
"I am really pleased at the repository's ability to convey some of the excitement of the NSF's computational science activities," says Lawrence Brandt, NSF program manager for the Division of Advanced Scientific Computing. "The ability to reach thousands of individuals directly on the Web is a big plus over our previous print publications."
To access Computational Science Highlights via the World Wide Web, click here.
Christopher Adasiewicz, former student intern in the NCSA Director's Office, recently graduated in journalism from UIUC. In the fall he will enroll in the master's program at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania.
