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The ASC provides the collaborative environment for numerous geographically distributed projects in different scientific disciplines. It accomplishes this through the ASC Portal, a specialized framework for the Cactus Computational Toolkit, that ties astrophysics and grid computing together. The following projects base their simulation codes on the Cactus Toolkit:

Institution	Focus
Albert Einstein Institute, Potsdam, Germany (AEI)	Numerical Relativity of black holes and gravitational waves.
Washington University, St Louis, USA	Computational General Relativistic Astrophysics
University of California San-Diego (UCSD), NCSA	Eulerian hydrodynamics, MHD, Radiation hydrodynamics
Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory	Early Universe Studies, computational science development
Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory	Plasma Physics
Penn State University, Numerical Relativity Group	3D evolutions of spacetime (Maya code and Cactus)
University of Texas-Austin	Numerical Relativity
University of Texas-Brownsville	Numerical Relativity
California Institute of Technology	Numerical Relativity and Astrophysics
NASA - Goddard	Numerical Relativity
University of Maryland	Numerical Relativity
University of Chicago, IL, USA	Bio-informatics - Smith Waterman Algorithm for homogenous genes
UNAM, Mexico City	Numerical Relativity
Universitaet-Tuebingen	Numerical Relativity
Southampton University	Numerical Relativity and Astrophysics
Universitaet Jena	Numerical Relativity
University of South Africa	Numerical Relativity
University of Pittsburgh	Numerical Relativity
Monash University	Numerical Relativity
Max-Planck-Institut fuer Astrophysik-Garching	Stellar core collapse
RIKEN-Japan	Numerical Relativity
Theoretical Astrophysics Center, Copenhagen, Denmark	Numerical Relativity
SISSA, Trieste, Italy	Neutron Star evolution, general relativistic astrophysics
University of Heidelberg, Germany	Stellar core collapse
University of Arizona, Tuscon, USA	Stellar core collapse
University of Portsmouth, UK	Numerical Relativity
Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA, USA	Numerical Relativity
Vrie University, Amsterdam, Holland	Climate Modelling
NASA-Goddard, USA	Climate Modelling

The ASC portal manages the various aspects of a Cactus simulation (building a configuration, launching a simulation) and also enables the visualization of output data. The collaborative aspects of the portal derive their power from the communication (XML/SOAP) between the Cactus code and the ASC portal. Users can launch jobs on remote resources that announce their existence to the portal, display their resource hostname, data storage directory, current time-step, and the port number of a web server that provides additional simulation information. Group members can subsequently follow the job's progress and view job details by means of this web server.

The web server enables scientists to control the parameters of their simulation, to view the output files, to see the output data using local visualization tools, etc. When the simulation is completed the portal can restart the webserver. The portal also provides a web interface for launching visualization tools remotely. One of the goals of our project is to make access to supercomputing simulations and grid resources as easy as access to the web.

Additionally, the ASC has a collection of tools to allow the study of astrophysical phenomena where the relevant space/time scales change with many orders of magnitude (e.g., gravitational collapse). The technique used by the ASC tools is Adaptive Mesh Refinement (AMR). The AMR effort consists of: (1) Cactus AMR Libraries/infrastructure and (2) Vision, an advanced visualization package for rendering AMR datasets.

ZEUS codes have been successfully used in many different areas in physics and astrophysics. The project CactusZeus, as a part of the KDI Project, is to implement the ZEUS algorithms as thorns for Cactus as an application for non-relativistic hydrodynamics simulations. The name of the arrangement is "CactusZeus".

The ASC codebase serves as a solid foundation for extensions to the next generation portlet and services frameworks. The ASC portal has inspired follow-up projects like GridLab (in particular the development done by Work Package 4 is based on the ASC work), EUNetwork, and GriKSL through its collaborative environment. The ASC technology is being proposed as a basic framework in the "Open Grid Computing Environments" for the Global Grid Forum. Also, the ASC project lead to the winning of both the Gordon Bell Prize and the Bandwidth Challenge Award in the year 2001.