Dear Colleagues:

As announced, here is our report of the first day of the "Virtual
Observatories and large-scale simulations" workshop in Tuscon.
The following people were present:

Tod Boroson      NOAO         Charles Liu      AMNH
Robert Brunner   Caltech      Jun Makino       U. Tokyo
Romeel Dave      Steward      Arcot Rajasekar  Sdsc
Dave De Young    NOAO         Peter Teuben     U. Maryland
Piet Hut         IAS          Wolfgang Voges   MPI
Stuart Levy      NCSA         Joel Welling     PSCC
Roger Lynds      NOAO         David Zurek      AMNH

  (supporting pictures and URLs on http://bima.astro.umd.edu/nemo/nvo/)

Jemery Mould (Director NOAO) welcomed us, Dave opened with some brief
statements, and gave the floor to Robert, who was made a presentation of
the background of (N)VO, which you can find on the website listed above.

After lunch, Piet presented a concrete example of simulation data,
from GRAPE based simulations of globular clusters including stellar
evolution, with emphasis on visualization and archiving.  Peter showed
how we visualize these data in the Hayden planetarium using state of
the art immersive visualization software and hardware.  Stuart gave us
a flavor of those visualizations in real time on a desktop version.

Romeel summarized a second example: cosmological simulations, from
his experience in the GC3 consortium.  While successful in producing
scientific results, the initial detailed plan to deliver software back
to the community turned out to be a bit too optimistic.  We discussed
the implications for similar VO related plans and targets.

Raja concluded the day with an interesting application on how data can
be shared with the SRB browser, an application (which looks like
the Explorer in WinNT) that allows transparent file sharing independent
of OS (win/unix/mac) with properties like replications and file locking.

Today (Wednesday) we will continue our discussions with the aim of
building toy models to start exploring some basic VO functionality.

 Dave De Young
 Piet Hut
 Peter Teuben

PS: for further/future information, see the website listed above