Towards Web/Java-based high performance distributed computing-an evolving virtual machine

Discusses the emergent World Wide Web-based distributed environments for high-performance computing and communications (HPCC) on the National Information Infrastructure (NII) with the focus on Java as an enabling technology. We start with a review of the past, present and near-term future of the "Java phenomenon", exposed in the background of some related previous approaches towards a distributed interpretative virtual machine architecture. Next, we discuss the anticipated role of Java in building distributed Web-based computing environments. We outline an evolutionary path from the current Web technology "soup" towards "all-Java" systems and we illustrate this process in terms of the Northeast Parallel Architectures Center (NPAC) Web technology prototypes (WebVM, WebFlow, Bridge-based Collaboratory) and selected applications (CareWeb, 3D Visible Human).