5. Public Demonstrations
The following is a list of major events where the system has been demonstrated since 2003
Lariat Meeting, January 9-10, 2005, Honolulu, HI …
Lariat (http://lariat-west.org/) is a project that provides high speed networking to Alaska, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, and Wyoming. One primary application of the network is the remote monitoring and eventual remote control of scarce resources not available at some of the smaller Lariat partner sites. In the January 2005 demonstration, participants in the Lariat meeting were able to monitor the output of a multi-photon confocal microscope with unique modifications for high precision specimen stage movements. Useful information under the microscope is generally identified by slight changes in color or contrast, necessitating the highest quality video possible to distinguish useful features in an already high noise low contrast environment. TeraVision allowed an uncompressed video stream from the microscope, at 8 bits per pixel, to be sent to the Lariat meeting room at 400 Mbps.
The general impression of biological scientists at the meeting was one of great enthusiasm upon seeing the quality and high frame rates even over long haul networks. Based on the demonstration, plans are being made to add several TeraVision servers on the Lariat network for serving video from instrumentation, enabling remote collaboration.
SC’2004, November 6-12, 2004, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania …
Version 3.0 of the system had a test-release of the system’s integration with the Access grid framework. This was demonstrated at SC Global 2004 show floor where the audience was able to see users at three TeraVision site collaborating by sending high-resolution video at 500 MBps over IP multicast. The three participating sites for the demo were at the Electronic Visualization Lab, Technology Research, Education, and Commercialization Center (TRECC) and the SC Global conference room. The participants at the three sites were able to collaboratively send and receive video streams over a TeraVision channel.
NSF OptIPuter Site Visit at EVL, June 29, 2004
NCSA Private Sector Program Annual Meeting, April 26-28, 2004 …
TeraVision’s wide area high-bandwidth, multicast capabilities were demonstrated for the first time during the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) Private Sector Program (PSP) Annual Meeting in Urbana, Illinois, April 26-28, 2004.
During the meeting, EVL demonstrated GeoWall, TeraVision and Access Grid in
support of a live networked Continuum session between EVL, the Technology
Research, Education, and Commercialization Center (TRECC) at DuPage County Airport, and NCSA in Urbana. EVL’s Continuum Project aims to develop integrated ubiquitous tools and environments to enhance collaboration. A TeraVision server at EVL streamed the output of a laptop running the MaeViz (Mid-America Earthquake Visualization) software to four TeraVision clients at TRECC and one TeraVision client at NCSA simultaneously. The multicast streams were run at 12fps of 1024x768 video, which amounts to 225Mbps of network traffic. This demonstration was significant because a special testbed was set up for multicasting data over wide-area gigabit networks, and the intermediate routers were configured to handle the load generated by the high-speed
multicast streams. Typical gigabit networks are not expected to handle such
high-bandwidth multicast streams.
MXQ and Flow-based Networking Workshop, February 10, 2004
EVL hosted a one-day workshop on MXQ and Flow-based Networking as part of the ongoing ON*VECTOR (Optical Networked Virtual Environments for Collaborative Trans-Oceanic Research) joint research program between NTT Network Innovation Laboratories, University of Tokyo and EVL. NTT’s experimental MXQ (MaXimal Queuing) mechanism running TeraVision and local Access Grid applications using Caspian Aperio flow-based routers were demonstrated. MXQ is an optimized flow-based traffic control technique designed to enable dynamic arbitration of IP flows by implementing a forwarding policy that gives lower priority to higher rate flows.
Radiological Society of North America, November 30-December 5, 2003 …
At the 89th Scientific Assembly and Annual Meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) in Chicago, EVL used TeraVision to stream stereo red/blue anaglyphic animations of medical volume visualization data from an ImmersaDesk at University of Chicago to the McCormick Place conference center via MREN. Both TeraVision and the application used Quanta and EVL’s CAVELib graphics library to support the tele-immersive networked session and apply the red/blue coding to the data. Unlike standard video streaming systems, TeraVision is capable of transferring uncompressed high-resolution visualizations over advanced networks.
SC’2003, November 15-21, 2003, Phoenix, Arizona …
EVL demonstrated the Glimmerglass System 300E Layer 1 Fiber Switch configured with photonic multicasting. In the demo, a single lambda emitted from a gigabit network card was replicated into identical data streams using optics inside the switch. The photonic multicasting demonstration involved a TeraVision server multicasting high-resolution video from one node in the cluster to three receiving nodes at 650Mbps (or 35 fps).