ABSTRACT
This chapter presents new directions and our views on contentious issues that engineers face today in the design and development of distributed solutions for large-scale problems in analysis, design and visualization. Considerable expertise has been invested in designing sparse storage schemes and out-of-core assembly and elimination processes to keep the memory requirement small and solution time manageable. Since Virtual Reality Markup Language (VRML) viewers are included with popular web browsers such as Microsoft Internet Explorer and Netscape Communicator, engineers can view and navigate a VRML world on most platforms, ranging from inexpensive PCs to powerful Unix workstations. With wide-scale acceptance of the internet in enterprise computing, distributed network infrastructure is rapidly growing in most organizations. The client-server approach based on collaboration using synchronous communication helps avoid slow and inflexible file transfer protocols. However, in a loosely coupled asynchronous messaging environment, file-based collaboration becomes necessary.
