The Living Textbook creates a unique learning environment enabling teachers and students to use educational resources on multimedia information servers, supercomputers, parallel databases, and network testbeds. We have three innovative educational software applications running in our laboratory, and under test in the classroom. Our education-focused goal is to learn how new, learner-driven, explorative models of learning can be supported by these high bandwidth, interactive applications and ultimately how they will impact the classroom of the future.

Electromagnetic scattering (EMS) simulation is an important computationally intensive application waihin the field of eleciromagnetics.Advances in high performance computing and communication (HPCC) and data visualization environ ment(DVE) provide new opportunities to visualize real-time simulation problems such as EMS which requzre stgntficant computational resources.In this work, an integrated interactive visuahzatzon environment was created for an EMS simulation, coupling a graphtcal user tnterface(GUI) for runtime simulation parameters input and 3D rendering output on a graphical workstation, with computational modu!es running on a parallel supercomputer and two workstations.Application Visualization System(AVS) was used as integrating software to facilitate both networking and scientific data visualization.Using the EMS simulation as a case study in this paper, we explore the AVS datafiow methodology to naturally integrate data visualization, parallel systems and heterogeneous computing.Major issues in integrating this remote visualization system are discussed, including task decomposition, system integration, concurrent control, and a high level DVE-based distributed programming model.