, IBM announced the start of a five-year effort to build a massively parallel computer, to be applied to the study of biomolecular phenomena such as protein folding. The project has two main goals: to advance our understanding of the mechanisms behind protein folding via large-scale simulation, and to explore novel ideas in massively parallel machine architecture and software. This project should enable biomolecular simulations that are orders of magnitude larger than current technology permits. Major areas of investigation include: how to most effectively utilize this novel platform to meet our scientific goals, how to make such massively parallel machines more usable, and how to achieve performance targets, with reasonable cost, through novel machine architectures. This paper provides an overview of the Blue Gene project at IBM Research. It includes some of the plans that have been made, the intended goals, and the anticipated challenges regarding the scientific work, the software application, and the hardware design.

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This paper describes the architecture of Data Explorer,' a scientific visualization system. Data Explorer supports visualization of a wide variety of data by means of a flexible set of visualization modules. This paper discusses five elements of the system architecture: 1) A single powerful data model common to all modules that allows a wide range of data types to be imported and passed between modules. 2) Integral support for parallelism, aflecting the data model and the execution model. 3) A powerful set of visualization modules that are hzghly interoperable, due in part to the common data model, and exemplified b y the renderer. 4) A n execution model designed lo facilitate parallelization of modules and incorporating optimizations such as caching. 5) A two-process clientserver system structure consisting of a user interface that communicates with an executive via a dataflow language.

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