eScience research increasingly involves the need to facilitate multi-scale problem solving that spans wide ranges in space and time scales. It requires collaboration among researchers and practioneers from multiple disciplines, each with their own orientations towards problem identification, solution formulation, and implementation.

The panel discusses some of the challenges of working in multi-scale scenarios. Panelists present these challenges from two perspectives: application, and computing approaches.

• The first perspective focuses on issues such as scientific profiles involved, scales considered, data collected and produced, models, and visualization needs.
• The second viewpoint considers, among others, characteristics of data and storage structures to accommodate the wide variety of data scales and formats, language/workflow constructs that may facilitate the specification, execution, and interaction of models, and interface/interaction primitives.