Argonne National Laboratory's involvement an the Concurrent Supercomputing Consortium (CSC)-the consortium that owns and operates the Touchstone DELTA System-has been motivated primarily by the need to make high-performance computing resources available to our computer science research groups and to those researchers using large-scale computation in their scientific work. Since early May 1991 when the Touchstone DELTA System (DELTA) was first installed at Caltech, Argonne has been actively

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... it to investigate a variety of scientific problems. I n this short paper I describe some of our experiences and progress in global climate modeling, computational biophysics, and computational quantum chemistry. A t the end of the paper I have tried to draw some conclusions regarding the usability of machines like the DELTA. Overview With the installation of the DELTA those of us working on MIMD parallel programming tools and applications finally had access to a computer favorably comparable to the largest machines employed in scientific computing. To say that we had been working all these years for that moment would be an slight exaggeration, but it would have captured the spirit of the moment last spring when the machine ran the first real program. In many ways the existence DELTA is tangible proof that a large-scale general purpose parallel system is able to compete head on with traditional vector-supercomputing. The DELTA, due to it's large memory, large parallel filesystem and peak performance, has marked a *