CONCURRENCY—PRACTICE AND EXPERIENCE Concurrency: Pract. Exper. 2000; 00:1–19 Prepared using cpeauth.cls [Version: 2000/05/12 v2.0] DISCOVER: An Environment for Web-based Interaction and Steering of High-Performance Scientific Applications V. Mann, V. Matossian, R. Muralidhar and M. Parashar , Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Rutgers University, 94 Brett Road, Piscataway, NJ 08854. Tel: (732) 445-5388 Fax: (732) 445-0593 SUMMARY This paper presents the design, implementation, and deployment of the DISCOVER web-based computational collaboratory. Its primary goal is to bring large distributed simulations to the scientists’/engineers’ desktop by providing collaborative web-based portals for monitoring, interaction and control. DISCOVER supports a 3-tier architecture composed of detachable thin-clients at the front- end, a network of interactions servers in the middle, and a control network of sensors, actuators, and interaction agents at the back-end. The interaction servers enable clients to connect and collaboratively interact with registered applications using a browser. The application control network enables sensors and actuators to be encapsulated within, and directly deployed with the computational objects. The application interaction gateway manages overall interaction. It uses Java Native Interface to create Java proxies that mirror computational objects and allow them to be directly accessed at the interaction server. Security and authentication are provided using customizable access control lists and SSL-based secure servers. KEY WORDS: Web-based Computational Collaboratory, Computational Interaction & Steering 1. INTRODUCTION Simulations are playing an increasingly critical role in all areas of science and engineering. As the complexity and computational cost of these simulations grows, it has become important for scientists and engineers to be able to monitor the progress of these simulations, and to control or steer Correspondence to: Manish Parashar CAIP/ECE, Rutgers University, 94 Brett Road, Piscataway, NJ 08854, USA E-mail: vijay,vincentm,rajeevdm,parashar @caip.rutgers.edu The DISCOVER collaboratory can be accessed at http://www.discoverportal.org/ Contract/grant sponsor: National Science Foundation (CAREERS); contract/grant number: ACI 9984357 Received 31 July 2000 Copyright c 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Revised 01 December 2000