Research Assistants: T. Drashansky, N. Ramakrisna
Sponsors: Intel, NSF
Recent and anticipated technological advances in wireless computing will permit users to compute ubiquitously, ``anywhere'' and ``any time''”. The hardware involved in the mobile scenario has inherent restrictions, like limited amounts of communication bandwidth, memory, and power. Another critical issue is the nature of the interfaces, which will need to operate with limited screen space and pen devices. All these factors have contributed to a situation where most truly mobile, hand-held devices do very little by way of actual computation. Unlike their static cousins, they neither have adequate compute power on board, nor do they allow us to access the compute power distributed across the network. This is perhaps a major contributing factor to the relatively slow increase in their use, despite predictions to the contrary. In the SciencePad project our aim is to develop ``ubiquitous'' problem solving environments (UPSEs) to support mobile access to applications. For applications to truly thrive in this environment, they must be mobile aware at all levels. The aim of our research is the design and implementation of software environments that would allow users to not just fetch information but do useful computations from mobile platforms. Specifically, we envision a scientist or engineer will ubiquitously access high performance (scientific) computing resources spread across the network via mobile platforms. This will be realized by building ubiquitous problem solving environments (UPSEs) that in turn will build upon our prior work on PSEs for Scientific Computing.