For the past 17 years, EVL’s partnership with NCSA and the Alliance has enabled the rapid deployment and acceptance of EVL’s advanced scientific visualization and tele-immersion hardware and software systems, as well as its international grid infrastructure for high-performance computing and communications. Strong ties with Alliance partners have enabled EVL to collect, maintain, develop, distribute and evaluate visualization and virtual-reality tools and techniques, as well as design, implement and maintain a new generation of real-time network performance monitoring and persistent database tools tuned to application uses of high-performance networks.

EVL currently deploys its innovative research in visualization and advanced networking to three Alliance Expeditions: Scientific Workspaces of the Future (SWOF), PACI Data Quest (PDQ), and Modeling Environment for Atmospheric Discovery (MEAD). In SWOF and MEAD, AGAVEs have been deployed to visualize atmospheric and biological datasets. TeraVision experiments have been conducted to test high-resolution graphics streaming of atmospheric visualizations, and human-factor experiments are underway to determine how best to design workspaces for scientific collaboration. In PDQ, EVL’s Quanta toolkit is being used to enhance the performance of GridFTP by exploiting an aggressive and predictable UDP-based data delivery scheme. Furthermore, EVL’s StarLight optical network exchange and co-location facility is being used by PDQ as a data caching center to increase the accessibility of data to collaborators during PDQ experiments.

EVL also partners with scientific communities to develop information technology infrastructure for Major Research Equipment facilities. EVL works with the Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation system integration (NEESgrid), Earthscope, GriPhyN and TeraGrid communities to deploy its technologies.