7.2.6 Distributed and Shared Address Spaces

		10.2.4 Virtual Reality

		Full immersion synthetic environments can be generated by exploiting Beowulf's parallel nature. This will require extensive software development, and may also benefit from hardware advances, such as new graphics engines with explicit support for parallel rendering. Different parts of the virtual space can be manipulated and visually rendered on separate nodes with overall synchronization and final image assembly coordinated across the system. It is likely that with proper partitioning of the simulated space, the I/O bandwidth to drive large, immersive visual presentation devices can be parallelized across the Beowulf nodes as well.

		10.2.5 Process Control

		Process control in manufacturing has long been a key application area for distributed systems. Process control is often achieved with a mix of specialized embedded processors and larger more rugged computers integrated with a LAN. Beowulfclass systems could be applied to this important domain of application. However, additional requirements that have not been satisfied to date would be imposed on the Beowulf. These include fault tolerance and real-time response. Both require additional capabilities to be developed as part of the Linux-based software infrastructure.

		10.2.6 Artificial Intelligence

		The use of symbolic processing for the emulation of cognitive processes is the domain of artificial intelligence (AI). Although quite different from more conventional numerical computation in that it manipulates encodings of relationships rather than numbers, AI can be very compute intensive. Structures such as semantic webs describe the complex interrelationships of objects, actions, qualities, and concepts. These and other symbolic data are processed to solve puzzles, play chess, control robots, analyze images, and perform speech analysis. The dominant language for the AI community is LISP and the premiere commercial Common LISP package, Allegro Common LISP is available for Linux systems. Porting AI applications to Beowulf, while not trivial, may be feasible in many cases where large symbolic data structures can be searched in parallel.

		10.2.7 Genetic Programming

		Writing programs that write programs is the purview of genetic programming, a rapidly evolving discipline that is dedicated to devising means of automatic or declarative programming. Genetic programming searches an abstract space of pos-