Argonne National Laboratory is one of the U.S. Department of Energy's largest research centers.
It is also the nation's first national laboratory, chartered in 1946.
The mission of the Computer Science and Mathematics Division is to enhance U. S. scientific and
technological capabilities in computational sciences, intelligent systems and information
technologies vital
to issues of national importance by combining long-range, future-oriented research and development
efforts performed in collaboration with industry and universities with near-term, sustained
technology
transfer.
The Parallel Tools Consortium
A Collaboration of Researchers, Developers, and Users Working to Make Parallel Tools Responsive to User Needs
The Parallel Tools Consortium brings together representatives from the federal, industrial, and
academic sectors to
address the factors that inhibit tool use and tool usability on parallel computers:
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- Current parallel tools do not respond to the specific needs of scientific users who must become
quasi-computer
scientists to understand and use the tools;
- Tools vary widely across current parallel platforms, so the steep learning curve must be
repeated each time a user
migrates to a new machine; and
- The lack of specialized support for heterogeneous or scalable applications also deters users
from investing the effort
needed to parallelize scientific libraries or applications that could be used by third parties.
Our mission is to take a leadership role in defining, developing, and promoting parallel tools that
meet the specific
requirements of users who develop scalable applications on a variety of platforms.
The Consortium was established in November 1993.
