Scientists no longer need to be In ttie same room 

 with their laboratory equipment. Instead, they 

 can control it over the network from their desktop 

 computers. Pictured Is a scientist controlling a 

 high-voltage electron microscope (useful for 

 Imaging thick three-dimensional biological 

 tissues) from her Sun workstation. 



diverse technologies to a single class of scientif- 

 ic problems. The capabilities of the microscope 

 for scientific investigation will soon be extend- 

 ed, combining image data acquisition with com- 

 puting resources to render, view, and animate the 

 images for real-time analysis. By connecting the 

 microscope to a high speed network, the instru- 

 ment will someday be made available to investi- 

 gators located in any geographic region, extend- 

 ing the accessibility of the resource to a broader 

 scientific community in a collaborative environ- 

 ment. 



Future plans call for extending this environment 

 to the Apple Macintosh; implementing automatic 

 focusing and calibration of the microscope (now 

 handled by a human operator); developing 

 remote image analysis tools; optimizing the 

 tomography reconstruction code currently run- 

 ning on a Cray Y-MP system; and implementing 

 the code on a parallel computing platform. 



Real-time Radio Telescope Observatory 



The application of the operational concepts 

 described above is not limited to microscopes. 

 A research group affiliated with the National 

 Center for Supercomputing Applications 

 (NCSA) in Champaign-Urbana, IL is investigat- 

 ing how to apply this model to real-time radio 

 telescope observation. This group is seeking to 

 demonstrate the feasibility of connecting the 

 Berkeley-Illinois-Maryland Array (BIMA) radio 

 telescope array, located at the Hat Creek 

 Observatory in northern California, to NCSA 

 supercomputers via high speed networks. 



One of their needs calls for transferring a giga- 

 byte-size observed visibility dataset from the 

 telescope to NCSA for processing, and then 

 returning the processed data to Berkeley for 

 analysis on a workstation. In this way, the 

 astronomer can judge the quality of the data, see 

 if the signal is strong enough to proceed with the 

 observations, judge whether the area of the sky 

 being mapped is correct, and experiment with 

 processing parameters. By connecting BIMA 

 directly to BLANCA, one of five HPCC sup- 

 ported gigabit testbeds, and increasing the num- 

 ber of present antennae from three to six, the 



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