Introduction

I believe all the discussion at the conference can be organized around the vision of a seamless, heterogeneous, distributed, high-performance computing environment that has emerged during the week and that K. Speierman alluded to in his remarks (see Session 1). The elements in this environment include, first of all, the people—skilled, imaginative users, well trained in a broad spectrum of applications areas. The second ingredient of that environment is low-cost, high-performance, personal

workstations and visualization engines. The third element is mass storage and accessible, large knowledge bases. Fourth is heterogeneous high-performance compute engines. Fifth is very fast local, wide-area, and national networks tying all of these elements together. Finally, there is an extensive, friendly, productive, interoperable software environment.

As far as today is concerned, this is clearly a vision. But all of the pieces are present to some extent. In this summary I shall work through each of these elements and summarize those aspects that were raised in the conference, both the pluses and the minuses.

Now, we can't lose sight of what this environment is for. What are we trying to do? The benefits of this environment will be increased economic productivity, improved standard of living, and improved quality of life. This computational environment is an enabling tool that will let us do things that we cannot now do, imagine things that we have not imagined, and create things that have never before existed. This environment will also enable greater national and global security, including better understanding of man's effect on the global environment.

Finally, we should not ignore the intellectual and cultural inspiration that high-performance computing can provide to those striving for enlightenment and understanding. That's a pretty tall order of benefits, but I think it's a realistic one; and during the conference various presenters have discussed aspects of those benefits.