The Applications Working Group played two major roles in the workshop. First, the needs of important applications are the motivation for designing and building PetaFLOPS machines. This is discussed in Section 4.2 on general terms. Second, the characteristics of potential PetaFLOPS scale applications can be used to guide the other three workshop activities; devices, architectures, and software for PetaFLOPS computers. Our general findings in this area can be found in Section 4.3.
In Section 4.4, we approach the issues of Sections 4.2 and 4.3 from the point of view of particular applications. Section 4.5 describes algorithmic issues.