Designing the Future

The Futures Lab was founded within the Mathematics and Computer Science Division of Argonne National Laboratory in the fall of 1994. The goal of the lab is develop new technology and systems to support collab-orative science. In order to meet this goal, the lab is organized around three research areas: advanced networking, multimedia, and virtual environments. The Argonne Computing and Communications Infrastructure Futures Laboratory (Futures Lab) was created in 1994 to explore, develop, and prototype next-generation computing and communications infrastructure systems. An important goal of the Futures Lab project is to understand how to incorporate advanced display and media server systems into scientiic computing environments. The objective is to create new collaborative environment technologies that combine advanced networking, virtual space technology, and high-end virtual environments to enable the construction of virtual teams for scientiic research. We believe that digital media, immersive displays, and networked collabora-tive spaces are critical elements of future computing environments and will be in common use by the end of the decade. We hope that our eeorts will provide new capabilities to scientiic computing systems and will accelerate development of virtual organizations to conduct experimental, computational, and theoretical science. Our eeorts are largely focused on technology development and integration with selected applications projects used to demonstrate the new technology. We are interested in driving large-scale supercomputer systems architecture to