🚀 go-pugleaf

   Through my job at the California Department of Water Resources, I'm 
involved in Project Sequoia 2000 (which is the successor to Project Athena
at MIT, which produced X-windows).  The objective of 
Project Sequoia 2000 is to produce a new computer paradigm for 
global change researchers, i.e. earth system scientists studying
things like oceanography, climate, solar irradiance, vegetative
mapping, etc.  The basic premise is that the current computer systems
are not adequate to support the kinds of applications that these
scientists would like to do; Project Sequoia 2000 will develop new
applications which will enable better research on the environment,
natural resources management, etc.

    The researchers, both global change scientists and
computers scientists, are from UC.  There are a lot of industry 
sponsors for the project (it's Digital Equipment Corporation's 
flagship project), for example, DEC, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Xerox.  
Funding for the next three years is approximately 40 million dollars.  
Research areas will include networking, database management, 
scientific visualization, and hardware.

    As part of the project, there will be a demo which will be completed
in April-May 1992.  There will be 3-5 minute intro during which 
scientific visualization sequences, animation sequences, video,
geographic information systems coverages, satellite images, weather
mapping, etc. will be shown.  After the introduction, someone will
probably do some examples of operations with the software.  The
purpose of the demo is to promote public awareness of the project,
encourage further industry support, etc.

    We're starting to make decisions about what music to use for the demo,
and would appreciate comments on the following: 

o  Suggestions of pieces with an environmental focus

o  Suggestions of pieces which would be good for a demo of this type

o  Suggestions of artists who might be willing to donate copyrights
   for music for this environmental cause

o  Information on copyright laws, esp. for performances of classical music


   I've enclosed a more detailed abstract of the Sequoia 2000 Project
below, for those who are interested.  Thank you for your time.

   Please mail responses to me: woodruff@cs.ucdavis.edu

   
--Allison Woodruff


Abstract:

Better data management is crucial to the success of scientific 
investigations of natural resources management.  Achieving the 
goals of the U.S. Global Change Research Program will depend not 
only on improved measurement systems, but also on improved data 
systems that will allow scientists to manipulate the resulting 
large-scale data sets and climate system models, as well as 
compare model results with observations.  New modes of research
will require massive amounts of diverse data to be stored, 
organized, accessed, distributed, visualized, and analyzed.  

As the successor to Project Athena at MIT, Sequoia 2000 will 
address these issues.  The primary participants are DEC and 
researchers from UC.  Research will be conducted in the areas of 
storage, networking, distributed file systems, extensible 
distributed data base management, and scientific visualization.