The concept of Distributed Supercomputing (DS) is to interconnect commodity computing building blocks to create multi-Teraflop capability/capacity engines. Sandia is exploring DS as a complement to large-scale vendor machines because we see the development of a "new computing industry" -- companies like Intel are moving toward horizontal integration and away from chip-to-supercomputer vertical integration.

Connecting commodity components, potentially from multiple vendors, with commodity interconnects and software poses many challenges and provides many opportunities. The intent of this joint Sandia/Los Alamos/Oakridge/Swiss workshop will be to explore these issues such as:

• Is there a cost advantage to distributed supercomputing?
• What are the implications for software at every level?
• Does DS change the needs at the desktop?
• Can we leverage the academic work on systems like Beowulf?
• Can we turn the abundance of computational capacity we will have in the coming decade into a similar abundance of computational capability?
• What applications can easily use such a system?
• What changes would have to be made to other applications to allow them to use such a system?

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