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If we are successful in achieving our most ambitious goal, of fundamentally
transforming the ways in which information is created and disseminated in the university,
then Cornell will serve as a national model for universities in the information age. In
the process of getting to our goal, this project will have a significant impact at
Cornell, at other universities, and in the world at large, specifically by:
 | Creating new operating systems, networking, visual computing, and language technologies.
We are developing operating system support for secure, scalable computing, such as the
U-Net communications architecture (already used by Intel), the Horus and Ensemble
groupware systems, and the ARMS resource management system. The Rivl system for fast
prototyping of multimedia applications is being ported to NT, as are applications such as
the CoNote shared annotation system and the PREDATOR heterogeneous database system. |
| Evaluating Intel Architecture PCs running Windows NT in comparison to Unix-based
scientific workstations. Several research groups, such as the Materials Science Center
(MSC) and the Laboratory of Atomic and Solid-State Physics (LASSP), are proposing to
migrate their main research platform from Unix-based workstations to IA machines under NT.
Many other groups are proposing to add IA machines to form a mixed computing environment.
These leading scientists and engineers will demonstrate the utility of PCs as scientific
computing platforms. |
| Porting widely used research codes to Intel Architecture machines running Windows NT. In
addition to the new systems that will be developed by the Computer Science Department and
by groups moving to IA research platforms, several packages will be ported and made
available, including the LAASPTools utilities for numerical analysis and visualization. |
| Demonstrating the need for significant computing at the desktop for simulations and
interactive visual computing applications. The simulations being done at the Advanced
Computing Research Institute (ACRI), the graphical displays generated by the Program of
Computer Graphics, and the visual communications tools being developed in the Computer
Science Department will all push the limit of dual-processor desktop computers, and will
also take advantage of the MMX instruction set. |
| Developing new teaching techniques, new methods of learning, and new interactive and
visual course materials. Several groups will develop innovative new teaching tools and
investigate support for new styles of learning. An example of this is the manufacturing
module of "Llenroc Plastics" which is slated to include advanced multimedia
features. As part of the core research, we will develop new applications, which will
provide qualitatively new information resources. One example is a browser for stored
videos of lectures that combines the indexing of a reference work with the explanatory
power of an oral presentation. |
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