Architectures for distributed information systems supporting environmental simulation

Different distributed environmental simulation systems are presented They take advantage of the possibilities of modern network technologies to gather input data, perform simulation and spread the simulation results. The term 'distributed' applies in this context both to the simulation, this is a parallel (distributed) simulation on computer networks, and to the fact, that all components (pre- and postprocessing and the simulation models) may reside in different locations and will be accessed via the Web. The systems described use this architecture to a different extent. Based on this it is shown, that it should be possible to build a system which links various data sources, simulation models, visualization and information tools, all of them running possibly remotely on the corresponding hardware. Such a system would form a distributed virtual laboratory.