Director Emeritus, EVL Distinguished Professor of Computer Science

Thomas A. DeFanti

Interim Director and Director of Research, EVL Professor, Computer Science

Andrew Johnson

EVL Faculty (retired) Professor Emeritus, Computer Science

Robert V. Kenyon

Director Emeritus, EVL Professor, Computer Science

Jason Leigh

Associate Director (retired), MS Graduate

Alan Verlo

PhD Graduate, 2001

Craig Barnes

PhD Graduate, 2003

Yongjoo Cho

PhD Graduate, 2006

Eric He

MS Graduate, 2001

Naveen Krishnaprasad

PhD Graduate, 2017 MS Graduate, 2002

Michael Lewis

MS Graduate, 1997,  PhD Graduate, 2003

Kyoung Shin Park

MS Graduate, 2000

Nikita Sawant

MS Graduate, 2005

Chris Scharver

MS Graduate, 1994

Steven Cohen

PhD Graduate, 1998

Marek Czernuszenko

MS Graduate, 1995

Jon Goldman

PhD Graduate

Robert Grzeszczuk

MS Graduate 1989, PhD 1991

John Hart

MS Graduate, 1996

Milana Huang

MS Graduate, 1992

Randy Hudson (1951-2020)

MS &amp; MFA Graduate, 2002

Joe Insley

Abhinav Kapoor

Joanna Mason

EVL Faculty Professor, Computer Science MS Graduate, 1994

Michael E. Papka

MS Graduate

Chris Pratico

Trina Roy

Marty Ryan

MS &amp; MFA Graduate, 1997

Marcus Thiebaux

Rafael Vilasuso

MS Graduate, 2003, Systems Administrator - Center for Virtual Reality in the Arts (CVRA)

Allan Spale

PhD Graduate, 2008

Charles Zhang

Director, EVL 2014-2020 (retired)

Maxine Brown

EVL Faculty Research Associate Professor

Luc Renambot

PhD Graduate, 2009

Venkatram Vishwanath

MS Graduate, 2007

Nicholas Schwarz

Robert Kooima

PhD Graduate, 2011

Yu-Chung Chen

PhD Graduate, Spring 2008

Xun Luo

EVL Affiliated Faculty Professor, Computer Science Dean College of Engineering

Peter C. Nelson

Visting Research Scholar

Yi Chen

PhD Graduate, 2013

Sungwon Nam

PhD Graduate, 2014

Khairi Reda

PhD Graduate, 2018

Victor Mateevitsi

MFA Graduate, 2012

Jon Chambers

MS Graduate, 2014

Alex Simes

PhD Graduate, 2015

Huy A. Bui

EVL faculty, staff, and students organized the Showcase event as an experiment to establish an environment for computational scientists to interactively present their research at a major professional conference in a one-to-many format on high end workstations attached to large projection screens. The CAVE&reg; was introduced at this conference as the display device for Showcase.

Showcase

EVL&rsquo;s exhibit at Supercomputing &rsquo;93 focused upon experiential science in the CAVE Virtual Reality Theater. Applications demonstrations included Astrophysics, Computational Fluid Dynamics, Math, Meteorology and Genetic Programming. Applications were run in one or two modes: locally on the SGI/CAVE and/or distributed between the CM-5 and the SGI/CAVE. 

In local mode, CAVE participants explore pre-computed datasets. In distributed computing mode, participants may interactively steer their simulation codes on the CM-5. This ability enables CAVE users to explore and experiment with visualizations of pre-computed datasets, identify an area they want to enhance, and then invoke simulation codes on the networked supercomputer to compute new datasets. The CM-5 generates new data, which is then transferred to the SGI workstations for rendering and display in the CAVE. 

Scientific simulation codes are typically large and complex, and require HPCC resources - massively parallel processors, vector processors, massive datastores, large memories, or high-speed networks - to run efficiently. Depending on the datasets and type of analysis the scientists want to do, they set up their simulation codes to calculate greater detail, a different time step, or a different state defined by new parameters. In some instances, codes can be executed locally but take longer to run, so supercomputers are used to provide faster interaction. 

CAVE experiences enable researchers to interactively explore their scientific domains, play &ldquo;what if&rdquo; games by modifying their codes, and view the resulting visualizations in close-to-real-time. Virtual reality is recognized as an intelligent user interface to the emerging National Information Infrastructure, that will enable computational scientists and engineers to access HPCC enabling technologies and that will put the human in the loop for timely data analysis and understanding.

Supercomputing &rsquo;93

EVL took a leadership role at ACM / IEEE Supercomputing &rsquo;95 in the organization of the conference&rsquo;s Information Architecture. This involved the integration of electronic audio / visual support with local and national networking, and the transmission and delivery of information to conference attendees. It prioritized the linking of datasets, computers and VR display devices over long distances, and trouble-shot the problems of dealing with varying bandwidths, protocols, and routing and switching technology. 

The most extensive of the networks installed at the conference was the Information Wide Area Year (I-WAY), which was designed to provide the backbone for all high-end networking activities. The I-WAY was a working model for a proposed national-scale, applications-focused, community-based ATM network. 

Thomas A. DeFanti and Maxine D. Brown were co-chairs of a special conference event, the Global Information Infrastructure (GII) Testbed, designed to provide applications to test the feasibility of the I-WAY. Contributors developed large-scale simulations on dozens of this country&rsquo;s fastest computers, linked by the I-WAY, and presented their virtual-reality and scientific-visualization output on a CAVE, I-Desk, or I-Wall. 

EVL&rsquo;s goal was to encourage the development of teams, tools, hardware, system software, and human interface models on an accelerated schedule to enable national-scale, multi-site collaborations to facilitate solutions to National Challenge and Grand Challenge problems. The resulting applications demonstrated new paradigms for networking and scalable computing interoperability and optimization, as well as methods for graphical user interaction.

Global Information Infrastructure (GII) Testbed

The N.I.C.E. Project was demonstrated as a networked virtual environment on multiple ImmersaDesks as part of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications&rsquo; Research Exhibit at Supercomputing &rsquo;96, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, November 17-22, 1996.

The N.I.C.E. Project at SC &rsquo;96

Demonstrations of advanced Internet applications hosted by <a href="http://www.internet2.edu/">Internet2</a> and Highway 1 were the highlight of the University Corporation for Advanced Internet Development (UCAID) member spring meeting held in Washington D.C. 
 
EVLers demonstrated the following tele-immersive applications onsite using an ImmersaDesk networked to various remote locations including Old Dominion University, NCSA and EVL:
<ul>
<li>Cave5D demonstrated with Virtual Chesapeake Bay (Old Dominion University)</li>
<li>Video Avatars in The Chicago Mercantile Exchange Virtual Environment (EVL)</li>
<li>Networked Virtual Director (NCSA)</li>
</ul>

Still from Mercantile Exchange

Internet2 - Advanced Applications Demonstrations

The National Computational Science Alliance <a href="http://access.ncsa.uiuc.edu/index.alliance.html">(Alliance)</a> is a partnership among computational scientists, computer scientists, and professionals in education, outreach, and training at more than 50 U.S. universities
and research institutions working to prototype the computational and information infrastructure of the next
century. 

EVL, as a partner of the National Computational Science Alliance, participated in its annual meeting held at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Assembly Hall. The meeting&rsquo;s research exhibition included demonstrations run on ten ImmersaDesks. Andy Johnson and Jason Leigh gave a tutorial on <a href="http://www.evl.uic.edu/cavern">CAVERN</a>. 

EVL&rsquo;s VR demonstrations included: 
<ul>
<li>&ldquo;PartnerBall&rdquo; - A Dual View ImmersaDesk (Duodesk) Application (2 simultaneously tracked participants)</li>
<li><a href="http://www.ccpo.odu.edu/~cave5d/homepage.html">Cave5D</a> using CAVERNsoft networking</li>
<li>Networked <a href="http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/VR/grants">Virtual Director</a></li>
<li>Tele-Immersive Design Review with General Motors</li>
<li>Caterpillar&rsquo;s Industrial Design Review networked to EVL / Chicago</li>
</ul>

Assembly Hall, UIUC

Alliance &rsquo;98

The Tele-Immersive Data Explorer (TIDE) is a CAVERNsoft-based collaborative, immersive environment for querying and visualizing data from massive and distributed data-stores. TIDE is designed as a re-usable framework to facilitate the construction of other domain-specific data exploration applications challenged with the problem of having to visualize massive data-sets. 

At Supercomputing &rsquo;99, TIDE clients running on ImmersaDesks at various research exhibits (notably the <a href="http://www.ncdm.uic.edu/">National Center for Data Mining</a>, <a href="http://www-fp.mcs.anl.gov/division/welcome/default.asp">Argonne National Laboratory</a>, <a href="http://access.ncsa.uiuc.edu/index.alliance.html">Alliance</a> and <a href="http://www.llnl.gov">ASCI</a> booths), collaboratively queried and correlated data distributed among several DSTP (Data Space Transfer Protocol) servers. DSTP is a next-generation data mining tool for the distribution, inquiry, and retrieval of data columns for correlation studies.

TIDE at Supercomputing &rsquo;99

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign was named a recipient of the National Science Foundation&rsquo;s new Partnerships for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (PACI) program. Their award winning proposal, the National Computational Science Alliance, calls for the creation of a partnership of centers of excellence, hereafter called the &ldquo;Alliance&rdquo;, to prototype a computational infrastructure for the Nation for the 21st century. EVL is an Alliance partner and will work with other institutions to further develop collaborative tele-immersive virtual reality tool, techniques and methodologies.

National Computational Science Alliance

EVL will host U.S. <a href="http://www.senate.gov/~durbin/">Senator Dick Durbin</a> and members of the Illinois Congressional Delegation at UIC on Saturday, January 10, 1998. CAVE and ImmersaDesk technologies, advanced applications, and tele-immersion collaborative experiences will be demonstrated. 

This presentation is part of a forum, the Technology Leadership Workshop, organized by Senator Durbin to highlight some of the technologies being developed in Illinois that will take the U.S. into the future.

Technology Leadership Workshop

Workshop General Chairs: 
Larry Smarr and William Parker 
California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology [Cal-(IT)2] 
University of California, San Diego (UCSD) 
University of California, Irvine (UCI) 

Program Committee Chairs: 
Maxine Brown and Tom DeFanti 
Electronic Visualization Laboratory 
University of Illinois at Chicago 

Background Material: 
<a href="http://www.evl.uic.edu/activity/NSF/index.html">NSF CISE Grand Challenges in e-Science Workshop Report</a> 

Sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF) Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate, Advanced Networking Infrastructure and Research (ANIR) Division. Hosted by Cal-(IT)2, UCI.

NSF ANIR Workshop

In conjunction with Global Grid Forum 6 being held in Chicago, EVL is hosting an open house on Monday, October 14, from 4-6 PM. 

StarLight&#8480; -enabled demonstrations will be run throughout the EVL facility and in the SEL CAVE&trade; as part of a self-guided tour of the lab. 

The purpose of the demos are to educate the global Grid community about StarLight&#8480; as an enabling facility to large-scale global Grid applications. 

Featured applications will include: 
TeraScope: Visual Tera Mining (EVL), Kites Flying In and Out of Space (NCSA / UIUC &amp; EVL), High Performance Data Webs (LAC / UIC), Photonic TeraStream (iCAIR &amp; Northwestern University).

EVL Hosts Open House for GGF6

iGrid 2000, the International Grid, demonstrates how the power of today&rsquo;s research networks enables access to remote computing resources, distribution of digital media, and collaboration with distant colleagues. 

The concept of connecting geographically distant computing resources and people seamlessly, efficiently and routinely over high-performance networks is itself a major research topic, as computer scientists and application scientists worldwide prototype the 21st-century advanced computational infrastructure, or &lsquo;grid&rsquo;. 

iGrid highlights both the achievements in grid architecture development, and the advancements it enables in science, engineering, cultural heritage, art and architecture, media communications and distance education. 

iGrid features 24 applications from 14 regions Canada, CERN, Germany, Greece, Japan, Korea, Mexico, The Netherlands, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, United Kingdom and the United States with emphasis on tele-immersion, large datasets, distributed computing, remote instrumentation, collaboration, human / computer interfaces, streaming media, digital video and high-definition television. 

Applications are presented on impressive display technologies: the CAVE&trade; virtual-reality theater developed by the University of Illinois at Chicago, the Super-High Definition movie system from NTT Network Innovation Laboratory, and the Access Grid presentation environment developed by Argonne National Laboratory. Two ImmersaDesks&trade; as well as plasma displays also showcase applications in virtual-reality (stereoscopic) or large-screen (monoscopic) mode. 

iGrid is connected to the JGN, the WIDE Project Network (in cooperation with NTT, TTNet and PNJC), APAN and the APAN / TransPAC (100 Mbps) link to STAR TAP&#8480; - the international, interconnection point in Chicago, Illinois.

Blue Window Pane II

iGrid2000 Empowering Global Research Community Networking

Electronic Visualization Laboratory&rsquo;s (EVL) and Software Technologies Research Center&rsquo;s (STRC) Associate Director, Alan Verlo is recognized for his truly exemplary service, commitment, and dedication as one of the recipients of the 2002 UIC Award of Merit. Alan has made an outstanding contribution to EVL&rsquo;s / STRC&rsquo;s productivity in virtual reality and advanced networking research; he is directly responsible for the management and administration of EVL&rsquo;s / STRC&rsquo;s software and hardware infrastructure, systems support and maintenance, and is leading EVL / STRC in the development of the next-generation of &ldquo;cyber-infrastructure&rdquo; for networked computing systems / facilities. 

Awards Ceremony 11:00 am - 12:15pm 
Hors d&rsquo;oeuvres reception immediately following

Verlo Named UIC 2002 Award of Merit Recipient

Increased cholera outbreaks in Bangladesh, it turns out, are correlated with the periodic rising water temperatures in the Pacific Ocean, the weather pattern called El Nino. 

After reading a scientific paper that proposed such a connection, Robert Grossman downloaded climatic data from a computer managed by meteorologists in Colorado, and he accessed health statistics in a database maintained by the World Health Organization in Switzerland. Using information from the two databases, Grossman documented the connection between El Nino and Bangladesh cholera outbreaks. 

&ldquo;If you like working with numbers, you can use data to find relationships that help you make decisions,&rdquo; said Grossman, director of advanced computing at the University of Illinois at Chicago. In a world where everything is connected, new networking technology may be our best hope to understand what&rsquo;s going on around us. That&rsquo;s the goal of Chicago-area computer scientists who are devising ultrafast superbroadband connections that they say will transform the way scientists do research and the way people do business. The current Internet, with origins as a medium of military and scientific communications a generation ago, is a document-based network, said Grossman. The new superbroadband network he envisions will be data-based, requiring optical networks that run at speeds thousands of times faster than today&rsquo;s Web. 

&ldquo;We want to make the data alive,&rdquo; said Grossman, who is also chairman of <a href="http://www.magnify.com">Magnify Inc.</a>, a Chicago-based data mining firm. &ldquo;When you get data embedded in a document, it&rsquo;s like getting a fax. You can&rsquo;t go into a fax and change things or pull out individual items.&rdquo; Getting access to databases that contain mountains of statistics requires extreme speeds. Today&rsquo;s networks typically take hours to move 1 trillion bits of data, while advanced networks being built in Chicago move that much in a few minutes. 

Several optical networks are already running, with more set to light up this year. The various networks cover different service areas, ranging from the Chicago metro region to overseas, and they all are interconnected in a building on Northwestern University&rsquo;s Chicago campus. This is the nerve center for the next generation of superbroadband, and scientists can locate their equipment in Northwestern&rsquo;s building to plug directly into the various supernetworks, said Joe Mambretti, director of Northwestern&rsquo;s <a href="http://www.icair.org">International Center for Advanced Internet Research</a>. &ldquo;Soon, we&rsquo;ll have high-speed connections to the campuses and hospitals where researchers are located,&ldquo; Mambretti said. 

A project of the City of Chicago called CivicNet will lay fiber to all the schools, libraries, and police and fire stations in the city, taking high-speed links into every neighborhood, Mambretti said. There will be extra fiber laid with the expectation that private operators will find a way to make broadband links available to residences. Superbroadband networks come at a critical time for researchers. New technology enables scientists to gather information at an ever- increasing pace, with the mapping of the human genome being the prime example. In biology and many other fields, the amount of data generated each year is as great as all the data previously available. &ldquo;Data grows exponentially,&rdquo; said Grossman, &ldquo;but the number of people available who can look at it is constant. So almost none of it gets looked at, and discoveries go unfound.&rdquo; Using a superfast data-based Web, scientists will make discoveries in new ways, he said. Instead of doing new experiments to test their ideas, many scientists will mine existing data to find valuable information already lurking there. Chicago area leads way 

The Chicago region is at the forefront of building the necessary networks in part because of its history as a transportation crossroads, but also because of a local culture of cooperation among scientists here. Computer scientists at Northwestern, <a href="http://www.mcs.anl.gov">Argonne National Laboratory</a> and the U. of I. campuses in Chicago and Urbana-Champaign have long worked with each other to advance networking technology. &ldquo;Chicago is one of the few places in the country where people from different institutions and different disciplines work so closely as a team on infrastructure research,&rdquo; said Aubrey Bush, director of advanced networking infrastructure research at the <a href="http://www.cise.nsf.gov/div/anir/index.html">National Science Foundation</a>, which funds much of work on supernetworks. 

Local scientists have also tapped into state funding to get long- term leases on unused fiber, called dark fiber, that telecom carriers own. The computer scientists are using their own equipment to light the dark fiber and building networks that can carry up to 10 billion bits a second. These speeds, called 10 gigabits, link computers in different locations as tightly as if they were all components of a single computer. &ldquo;When you&rsquo;re connected at 10 gigabits, you&rsquo;re exchanging information at the same speeds that occur within a computer,&rdquo; said Thomas DeFanti, director of the software technology research center at UIC. 

Hooking individual computers across North America and in foreign countries at these speeds to computer servers containing mountains of raw data will give scientists the ability to share their work and make discoveries. It will also provide people working for businesses the ability to get needed information more easily, said Grossman. By getting long-term leases on dark fiber, researchers not only get to design their own advanced networks, but they also get a huge discount because of a glut of available fiber, said DeFanti. &ldquo;We can spend $30,000 to buy a segment of dark fiber for 20 years,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Spending $30,000 to buy that much bandwidth as a finished product from Ameritech would cover about three months.&rdquo; 

Setup is no easy task 
There is much more to setting up superbroadband networks than merely linking lots of computers together with really big information pipes, said Rick Stevens, director of Argonne&rsquo;s math and computer science center. &ldquo;Networks are a shared resource,&rdquo; said Stevens. &ldquo;You have to allocate resources, reserving channel space for a certain use at a specific time. You have to be adaptive as conditions change.&rdquo; Stevens is leading an effort to devise new protocols for advanced networks and to write software to make them work. 

Computer researchers in Amsterdam have built a mirror facility to the one based at Northwestern and are connected to it. Because networks by their nature must be connected to operate, working with partners in Europe, Canada and California will speed the progress of developing ultrafast networks that are highly reliable, said Mambretti. Networking technology is poised to achieve leaps of speed that will surpass the computing rule of thumb, called Moore&rsquo;s Law, that computer chips double their processing power every 18 months, said Thomas Greene, a senior program director for the National Science Foundation. &ldquo;Network capabilities are changing twice as fast as Moore&rsquo;s Law,&rdquo; said Greene. &ldquo;Moore&rsquo;s Law has already penetrated into daily life, but people are only beginning to feel the impact of networking possibilities.&rdquo; 

Jon Van| Tribune staff reporter

Changing Science At Light Speed; Superbroadband Gives Researchers Easy Data Access

The <a href="http://www.sota.vt.edu">Virginia Tech School of the Arts</a>, the Department of Art &amp; Art History, and XYZ Gallery introduces Tom Coffin&rsquo;s, Field, a special installation of 24&rdquo; x 36&rdquo; printed images that will hang through April 14th. These images are reconstructed and abstracted photos of a field outside the residence of artist Jacqueline Matisse-Monnier, in France. Field is a visualization of the play inside opposite geometries of an image. The composition creates a yantric image. &ldquo;In Field, the &lsquo;play of opposites&rsquo; are at work. As the viewer steps into the images the levels become more involved and (the viewers) move toward a personal interpretation.&rdquo; Coffin states that he intends &ldquo;to evoke a moment of contemplation, investigation, and peace&rdquo; through his translucent installation pieces. 

Tom Coffin is the technical coordinator and co-creator of a groundbreaking virtual reality artwork, <a href="http://www.raykass.com/html/Matisse/html/">Art Flying In &amp; Out of Space</a>, a collaboration with Jacqueline Matisse-Monnier. &ldquo;Kites Flying In and Out of Space&rdquo; is a collaborative art piece initiated by the Mountain lake Workshop of the Virginia Tech Foundation. Coffin is currently employed by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and is the Alliance Liaison for Virtual Environments, and the Technical Coordinator for the Alliance Center for Collaboration Education Science and Software in Arlington, Virginia. 

The exhibition is on display at XYZ Gallery, 223 North Main Street, Blacksburg, Virginia. A reception honoring the artist will take place Sunday, April 14, from 4:00pm to 6:00pm.

Field

Tom Coffin Exhibits &ldquo;Field&rdquo;

In a truly &lsquo;hands on&rsquo; demonstration, a haptics-enhanced virtual reality device now on exhibit at SC&rsquo;02 in Baltimore, shows how surgeons and medical modelers working together in a virtual space can produce precise fitting, pre-fabricated surgical implants without costly molding, casting or sculpting steps. 

Using PARIS (Personal Augmented Reality Immersive System), a projection-based &lsquo;augmented&rsquo; virtual reality display developed at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL), a surgeon and medical modeler can view a three-dimensional model of a patient&rsquo;s computed tomography (CT) data, and collaboratively review, sculpt and &lsquo;virtually&rsquo; build an implant using their hands. 

PARIS is optimized to allow users to interact with the environment using a variety of tactile input devices. An authentic sensation of the implant sculpting process is achieved using SensAble Technologies&rsquo; PHANTOM force-feedback device. The PARIS display has excellent contrast and variable lighting that allows a user&rsquo;s hands to be seen immersed in the imagery. 

A medically advanced, albeit labor-intensive and costly method for designing and building pre-surgical implants in virtual reality was developed and implemented at UIC in 1996. This process can correct traumatic head injuries and restore normal facial appearance. Although it revolutionized the still-widely practiced method of fashioning implants in the operating room using heat producing and potentially tissue damaging acrylics, it exists largely as a cost prohibitive option in most patient cases. 

The digital, networked, collaborative modeling environment aims to eliminate many time-consuming steps and make the surgical procedure widely available. The digital model of the implant can be exported directly to a variety of rapid-prototyping manufacturing modalities, making &lsquo;hands on&rsquo; sculpting, molding, and casting steps unnecessary, and allowing the use of new, state-of-the-art implant materials. 

The current PARIS prototype employs the Christie Mirage 2000 DLP projector and a double mirror-fold to compactly and brightly illuminate an overhead black screen. Images projected on the black screen are reflected on a half-silvered mirror positioned over the user&rsquo;s desk. Putting his or her hands under the mirrored area, the user can see and interact with the virtual image, or the physical haptic device and/or keyboard. The configuration is well suited to the lighting conditions of a typical office environment, and the device can be easily packed, moved and deployed. The half-silvered mirror display can be raised and lowered over the desktop, so users can either work at their desk or in the virtual-reality space without leaving their offices. PARIS uses EVL-developed collaboration and networking software CAVERNsoft and Quanta, which enable real-time interactions over very-high-speed networks. 

EVL has been working in cooperation with UIC&rsquo;s Virtual Reality in Medicine Laboratory and Department of Neurosurgery, to develop the collaborative augmented reality environment to provide a precise method to construct and revise pre-surgical cranial implant designs. 

&ldquo;We want to take a precise procedure and allow medical professionals to consult worldwide,&rdquo; said UIC medical modeler and application collaborator Ray Evenhouse. &ldquo;The tools to model implants in a digital environment are in place. Given the right networking conditions, we could begin routinely produce implants using this method within two years.&rdquo; 

The PARIS system is on exhibit in the Fakespace Systems booth at SC&rsquo;02 in Baltimore. Fakespace commercializes the EVL-developed CAVE&reg; and ImmersaDesk&reg; systems. EVL receives major funding for PARIS development from National Science Foundation&rsquo;s Major Research Instrumentation and Research Infrastructure awards, and the Department of Energy Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI) Visual Interactive Environment for Weapons Simulation (VIEWS) program. PARIS is a registered trademark of University of Illinois Board of Trustees.

PARIS&trade; Debuts at SC&rsquo;02 with Haptic Medical Demo

The National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded $13.5 million over five years to a consortium led by the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), and the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). The funds will support design and development of a powerful distributed cyber &ldquo;infostructure&rdquo; to support data-intensive scientific research and collaboration. Initial application efforts will be in bioscience and earth sciences research, including environmental, seismic and remote sensing. It is one of the largest Information Technology Research (ITR) grants awarded since the NSF established the program in 2000. 

Dubbed the OptIPuter - for optical networking, Internet Protocol, and computer storage and processing - the envisioned infostructure will tightly couple computational, storage, and visualization resources over parallel optical networks using the IP communication mechanism. 

&ldquo;The opportunity to build and experiment with an OptIPuter has arisen because of major technology changes in the last five years,&rdquo; said principal investigator Larry Smarr, director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology [Cal-(IT)2], and Harry E. Gruber Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at UCSD&rsquo;s Jacobs School of Engineering. 

&ldquo;Optical bandwidth and storage capacity are growing much faster than processing power, turning the old computing paradigm on its head: we are going from a processor-centric world, to one centered on optical bandwidth, where the networks will be faster than the computational resources they connect.&rdquo; 

The OptIPuter project will enable scientists who are generating massive amounts of data to interactively visualize, analyze, and correlate their data from multiple storage sites connected to optical networks. 

Designing and deploying the OptIPuter for grid-intensive computing will require fundamental inventions including software and middleware abstractions to deliver unique capabilities in a lambda-rich world. (A lambda, in networking parlance, is a fully dedicated wavelength of light in an optical network, each already capable of bandwidth speeds from 1-10 gigabits/second). 

The researchers in southern California and Chicago will focus on new network-control and traffic-engineering techniques to optimize data transmission; new middleware to bandwidth-match distributed resources; and new collaboration and visualization to enable real-time interaction with high-definition imagery. 

UCSD and UIC will lead the research team, in partnership with researchers at Northwestern University, San Diego State University, University of Southern California and University of California-Irvine [a partner of UCSD in Cal-(IT)2]. Co-PIs on the project are UCSD&rsquo;s Mark Ellisman and Philip Papadopoulos of the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at UCSD, who will provide expertise and oversight on application drivers, grid and cluster computing, and data management; and UIC&rsquo;s Thomas A. DeFanti and Jason Leigh, who will provide expertise and oversight on networking, visualization, and collaboration technologies. 

&ldquo;Think of the OptIPuter as a giant graphics card, connected to a giant disk system, via a system bus that happens to be an extremely high-speed optical network,&rdquo; said DeFanti, a distinguished professor of computer science at UIC and co-director of the university&rsquo;s Electronic Visualization Laboratory. 

&ldquo;One of our major design goals is to provide scientists with advanced interactive querying and visualization tools, to enable them to explore massive amounts of previously uncorrelated data in near real time.&rdquo; The OptIPuter project manager will be UIC&rsquo;s Maxine Brown. SDSC will provide facilities and services, including access to the NSF-funded TeraGrid and its 13.6 teraflops of cluster computing power distributed across four sites. 

The project&rsquo;s broad multidisciplinary team will also conduct large-scale, application-driven system experiments. They will be carried out in close conjunction with two data-intensive e-science efforts already underway: NSF&rsquo;s EarthScope, and the Biomedical Informatics Research Network (BIRN) funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). They will provide the application drivers to ensure a useful and usable OptIPuter design. 

Under co-PI Ellisman, UCSD&rsquo;s National Center for Microscopy and Imaging Research (NCMIR) is driving the BIRN neuroscience application, with an emphasis on neuroimaging. Under the leadership of UCSD&rsquo;s Scripps Institution of oceanography&rsquo;s Deputy Director and Acting Dean John Orcutt, Scripps&rsquo; Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics is leading the EarthScope geoscience effort, including acquisition, processing and scientific interpretation of satellite-derived remote sensing, near-real-time environmental, and active source data. 

The OptIPuter is a &ldquo;virtual&rdquo; parallel computer in which the individual &ldquo;processors&rdquo; are widely distributed clusters; the &ldquo;memory&rdquo; is in the form of large distributed data repositories; &ldquo;peripherals&rdquo; are very-large scientific instruments, visualization displays and/or sensor arrays; and the &ldquo;motherboard&rdquo; uses standard IP delivered over multiple dedicated lambdas. Use of parallel lambdas will permit so much extra bandwidth that the connection is likely to be uncongested. &ldquo;Recent cost breakthroughs in networking technology are making it possible to send multiple lambdas down a single piece of customer-owned optical fiber,&rdquo; said co-PI Papadopoulos. &ldquo;This will increase potential capacity to the point where bandwidth ceases to be the bottleneck in the development of metropolitan-scale grids.&rdquo; 

According to Cal-(IT)2&rsquo;s Smarr, grid-intensive applications &ldquo;will require a large-scale distributed information infrastructure based on petascale computing, exabyte storage, and terabit networks.&rdquo; A petaflop is one-thousand-times faster than today&rsquo;s speediest parallel computers, which process one trillion floating-point operations per second (teraflops). An exabyte is a billion gigabytes of storage, and terabit networks will transmit data at one trillion bits per secondsome 20 million times faster than a dialup 56K Internet connection. 

The southern California- and Chicago-based research teams already collaborate on large-scale cluster networking projects and plan to prototype the OptIPuter initially on campus, metropolitan and state-wide optical fiber networks (including the Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California&rsquo;s experimental developmental network CalREN-XD in California, and the Illinois Wired / Wireless Infrastructure for Research and Education [I-WIRE] in Illinois). 

Private companies will also collaborate with university researchers on the project. IBM is providing systems architecture and performance help, and Telcordia Technologies will work closely with the network research teams to contribute its optical networking expertise. &ldquo;The OptIPuter project has the potential for extraordinary innovations in both computing and networking, and we are pleased to be a part of this team of highly qualified and experienced researchers,&rdquo; said Richard S. Wolff, Vice President of Applied Research at Telcordia. Further, the San Diego Telecom Council, which boasts a membership of 300 telecom companies, has expressed interest in extending OptIPuter links to a variety of public- and private-sector sites in San Diego County. 

The project will also fund what is expected to be the country&rsquo;s largest graduate-student program for optical networking research. The OptIPuter will also extend into undergraduate classrooms, with curricula and research opportunities to be developed for UCSD&rsquo;s new Sixth College, whose inaugural freshman class in Fall 2002 will be the first to benefit from the college&rsquo;s commitment to the use of ubiquitous connectivity technologies. Younger students will also be exposed to the vision of the OptIPuter, with field-based curricula concentrated on Lincoln Elementary School in suburban Chicago, and UCSD&rsquo;s Preuss School (a San Diego City charter school for grades 6-12, enrolling low-income, first-generation college-bound students).

EVL Receives NSF Grant For OptIPuter Research

EVL participated in this year&rsquo;s All-Hands Meeting with presentations and demonstrations highlighting contributions to the Scientific Workspaces of the Furture (SWOF) and Modeling Environment for Atmospheric Discovery (MEAD) Expeditions. 

The demonstrations consisted of streaming video over the Gigabit ethernet network (GigE) between EVL / Chicago and Beckman Institute / Urbana, using EVL&rsquo;s TeraVision technology and the GeoWall to display climate and biological studies. A large eddy simulation of a 3D supercell storm was visualized with Vis5D and captured on a TeraVision box in Chicago, then received and displayed on a TeraVision box in Urbana. Though two sites were involved in the Alliance demonstration, TeraVision can be used to easily distribute simulations to multiple sites. The streamed simulation yielded very realistic storm features and wind fields observed in real thunderstorms. 

Visualization data provided by data Bob Wilhelmson, UIUC.

NCSA Tiled Display

EVL&rsquo;s Alliance Expedition Activities Presented at the 2003 All-Hands Meeting

EVL will be demonstrating an OptIPuter driven 5x3 LCD tiled display that has a collective resolution of 8000x3600 pixels at SC2003 in Phoenix, Arizona. EVL&rsquo;s collaborators are the following: Lab for Advanced Computing (LAC), San Diego Supercomputing Center (SDSC) and Oakridge National Laboratory (ORNL). 

Demonstrations on the display will include: 
JuxtaView - which will display extremely high resolution digital montages from earth science, neurobiology, and homeland security applications. 

Vol-a-Tile - which will display large time varying 3D seismic volumes. Vol-a-Tile will be fed volumetric data from a remote cluster at EVL using up 4Gigabits of connectivity from EVL to Phoenix. Furthermore Vol-a-tile will attempt to interface with the TeraGrid clusters to retrieve visualization data. 

TeraVision - a streaming graphics system, will demonstrate the new Glimmerglass multicast-capable photonic switch. The demonstration will show how the switch can be used as a patch-panel to direct light from one computer node to another. TeraVision will stream graphics to wherever the Glimmerglass switch is directed. Furthermore EVL will attempt to use the photonic multicasting capability to &ldquo;duplicate&rdquo; the light from the gigabit network adapters that are providing the TeraVision graphics stream, and direct it to 4 arbitrary receiving clients for simultaneous display. This will be a significant breakthrough because it will enable rapid data duplication at no extra computation cost.

The Tile Display, with the Glimmerglass Switch, at SC2003

EVL Participates in SC2003

Glimmerglass and University of Illinois at Chicago Join Forces to Develop New LambdaGrid Applications 

Streaming computing applied to lambda multicasting to improve application richness for Grid computing 

Hayward, Calif., and Chicago, Ill - Glimmerglass, a supplier of Transparent Connectivity solutions, and the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) today announced a partnership to support the development of a new class of compute-intensive applications running on high-performance computers configured into grids that are interconnected with fiber-optic links. Glimmerglass is providing a System 300E Layer 1 Fiber Switch configured with Photonic Multicasting&trade; to EVL, and the partners are collaborating on grid related application research, proofs of concept, technical publications, and presentations. Additionally, the partners will demonstrate applications of transparent connectivity and Glimmerglass Photonic Multicasting&trade; technology at the SC 2003 conference, in the National Center for Data Mining at UIC booth (#R2935), to be held in Phoenix Arizona, November 15-21, 2003. 

The partnership recognizes the potential associated with the convergence of two new technologies, grid middleware and affordable lambda networks, which is leading to the creation of LambdaGrids. Lambdas are wavelengths of laser light used to send parallel streams of data over a single optical fiber. These links are the superhighways, over which information between Grid computing nodes flows. 

The Glimmerglass System 300E enables &ldquo;streaming computing,&rdquo; the streaming of information, whether high-resolution imagery or massive databases, among the elements of the LambdaGrid with little or no latency. Grid developers, such as EVL, will experiment with the Glimmerglass system to dynamically offload large data-communications flows over optical networking test-beds. Because the Glimmerglass system switches lambdas transparently without detection and signal regeneration, it is &ldquo;future-proof,&rdquo; able to support any transmission speed or protocol, such as Gigabit Ethernet, 10 Gigabit Ethernet and beyond, including standards not yet available today. 

Lambda Multicasting is a Key Innovation 
Using streaming computing, Glimmerglass and EVL will investigate the potential benefits of the System 300&rsquo;s Photonic Multicasting&trade;, in which the Glimmerglass system replicates and transmits a lambda-stream carrying data to multiple computing resources on the LambdaGrid network. Separate, correlated operations can thus be simultaneously performed on each lambda-stream copy, such as a stereo rendering of image data. The Glimmerglass system can efficiently generate and transmit exact, synchronized copies of any lambda-stream without relying on higher layer protocols, such as TCP / IP or SONET. 

&ldquo;We are excited to partner with Glimmerglass on developing new Transparent Connectivity applications,&rdquo; said Tom DeFanti, Director of EVL. &ldquo;The use of the System 300E with Photonic Multicasting will enable new levels of scalability and flexibility, and keep the control of the network applications-centric. In addition to costing one to two orders of magnitude more than a Glimmerglass system, traditional network elements such as routers are not appropriate to our application, as they introduce latency and are inherently nondeterministic in data transmission.&rdquo; 

Immersive Collaboration Applications and Database Intrusion Detection 
EVL expects a paradigm shift in high-performance networks as applications move to new Grid-based system architectures, such as the OptIPuter, where the optical network acts like an enormous systems bus, connecting various data, computing, and visualization components that are distributed globally. &ldquo;The functional richness of elements like the Glimmerglass system is increasing all the time,&rdquo; said Jason Leigh, Associate Professor of Computer Science at EVL. Features such as Glimmerglass Photonic Multicasting technology should make it easier to advance my research on Amplified Collaborative Environments (ACEs), which are &ldquo;war rooms&rdquo; for distributed teams that share high-resolution immersive data visualizations. 

&ldquo;Streaming computing&rsquo;s lambda multicasting capability being developed by the EVL / Glimmerglass partnership have strong implications for my work on petabyte databases,&rdquo; said Robert Grossman, an EVL collaborator and Director of the National Center for Data Mining at the University of Illinois at Chicago. &ldquo;With this technology, we can create virtual data warehouses on the fly from distributed databases by using lambda-streaming to do &lsquo;streaming joins.&rsquo; As a first application, we will use streaming joins to improve distributed intrusion detection systems. This could be very important since distributed intrusion detection systems today produce so much data that a centralized data warehouse is no longer practical for real-time intrusion detection.&rdquo; 

Interoperability and Application Control 
EVL and Glimmerglass will collaborate to integrate their proof-of-concept investigations into applications-centric network middleware, enabling application developers to access advanced transparent connectivity capabilities of future LambdaGrids, thereby facilitating the adoption of these advanced micro-photonics products. &ldquo;Our Glimmerglass System 300 was designed to be an easy-to-deploy solution for information-intensive applications such as those running on the LambdaGrid,&rdquo; said Mark Housley, President and CEO of Glimmerglass. &ldquo;We are committed to accelerating the Grid&rsquo;s growth, and believe our virtues of simplicity, transparency, reliability, and openness are important for its success.&rdquo; 

About Glimmerglass 
Glimmerglass develops and manufactures the smallest, highest performing, and most reliable transparent connectivity solutions that manage light at the physical fiber, waveband, and individual wavelength levels. Glimmerglass delivers transparent connectivity technologies to the defense, intelligence, super-computing, test &amp; measurement, Internet infrastructure, enterprise, video production, cable and telecommunications industries. Founded by a team of micro-photonics veterans in 2000, and headquartered in Hayward, California, Glimmerglass is funded by top venture capital firms including Mobius Venture Capital, Onset Ventures, CDP Capital-Technology Ventures, Applied Materials Ventures, Ashford Capital Management, Inc. and Anthem Venture Partners. See: <a href="http://www.glimmerglass.com">www.glimmerglass.com</a>, send email to info @ glimmerglass.com, or call +1 510-780-1800. 

About the Electronic Visualization Laboratory 
The Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) is a graduate research laboratory specializing in virtual reality and real-time interactive computer graphics over advanced optical networks; it is a joint effort of UIC&rsquo;s College of Engineering and School of Art and Design, and represents the oldest formal collaboration between engineering and art in the country offering graduate degrees to those specializing in visualization. Having received recognition for developing the CAVE&reg; and ImmersaDesk&reg; virtual-reality systems, EVL&rsquo;s current research focus is tele-immersion - having users in different locations around the world collaborate over high-speed networks in shared, virtual environments as if they were together in the same room. Major funding is provided by the National Science Foundation. 

Glimmerglass and Photonic Multicasting are trademarks of Glimmerglass Networks, Inc. CAVE and ImmersaDesk are registered trademarks of the University of Illinois&rsquo; Board of Trustees. All other trademarks and service marks are the property of their respective holders.

Glimmerglass and EVL Join Forces to Develop New LambdaGrid Applications

In this month&rsquo;s issue of the Communications of the Association of Computing Machinery (<a href="http://www.acm.org/cacm/homepage.html">CAMC</a>) is a special issue devoted to high-performance networking and is guest edited by Maxine Brown, Associate Director of EVL. Four of the five articles in this special issue on high-performance networking are co-authored by UIC faculty Tom DeFanti, Bob Grossman, and Jason Leigh.

EVL Featured in CACM

Specially equipped rooms in a business headquarters used for conferences and planning, often referred to as war rooms, contain media intended to support or facilitate intense problem solving sessions. While flip-style tablets and white boards have long given way to computer technology and videoconferencing, these rooms remain largely self-contained. Researchers at University of Illinois at Chicago&rsquo;s Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) have developed a high-tech war room for scientists called the Continuum, where distributed collaborators solve problems assisted by advanced collaboration, computation and visualization technologies backed by PC clusters connected over gigabit networks. 

At this year&rsquo;s National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) Private Sector Program Annual Meeting April 26-28, EVL associate professor Jason Leigh and Ph.D. student Allan Spale will demonstrate three core technologies of the Continuum Project - GeoWall, TeraVision and Access Grid. 

EVL&rsquo;s Continuum Project aims to develop integrated ubiquitous tools environments to enhance collaboration. These include interactive stereoscopic displays, multi-site audio / video conferencing, and high-resolution tiled displays. 

&ldquo;We want to understand how to build rooms with walls made of high-resolution displays capable of both stereoscopic and monoscopic projection - allowing scientists and decision makers to see all of their data, all of the time,&rdquo; said Leigh. &ldquo;We believe display-rich environments are a powerful way to enhance group awareness in distance collaborations. It&rsquo;s something that today&rsquo;s basic video conferencing tools have great difficulty conveying.&rdquo; 

Working in a collaborative session between EVL in Chicago, the Technology Research, Education, and Commercialization Center (TRECC) in DuPage County and Beckman Institute in University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), Leigh and Spale will operate two applications, MAEviz and ImmersaView. 

MAEviz is an interactive visualization tool for earthquake risk assessment developed by UIUC&rsquo;s Mid-America Earthquake Center (MAE Center) in collaboration with NCSA. ImmersaView is an EVL-developed tool for viewing stereoscopic three-dimensional data sets on the GeoWall, its portable, passive-stereo projection system. 

Graphics from MAEviz will be streamed to the collaborators at NCSA and TRECC using EVL&rsquo;s TeraVision, a system for real-time high-resolution graphics distribution. The AccessGrid will provide videocasting as well as a standardized environment for launching collaborative applications such as ImmersaView. 

&ldquo;Our goal with the Continuum Project is to make long-distance partnerships more productive,&rdquo; said Tom Prudhomme, Senior Associate Director of NCSA&rsquo;s Cybercommunities Directorate and the leader of the TRECC project. &ldquo;Continuum combines the hardware, software, networks, and techniques that can enable researchers and knowledge workers to transcend geographic boundaries.&rdquo; 

TRECC, located at the DuPage County Airport, is a UIUC program funded by the Office of Naval Research (ONR) and administered by NCSA. It supports innovative research in advanced information technologies and their application for the Navy R&amp;D community. It also provides the DuPage business and education communities access to next-generation technologies and commercialization opportunities. 

NCSA&rsquo;s Private Sector Program provides a competitive edge to American companies, allowing them to access the emerging technologies and innovations developed by NCSA and its partners. Through partnerships with leading-edge companies, NCSA ensures that its developments address real-world challenges. The current industrial partners are Allstate, Boeing, Caterpillar, Motorola and Sears. 

The NCSA Private Sector Program meeting takes place April 26-28 at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign&rsquo;s Beckman Institute. 

About the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL): 
EVL is an interdisciplinary laboratory offering degrees in computer science and art, and specializing in virtual reality over high-speed networks. Located at the University of Illinois at Chicago, EVL&rsquo;s funded research projects include tele-immersion and collaboration software, the development of viable, scalable, deployable stereo displays, and management of next-generation advanced networking initiatives. For the past several years, EVL has been conducting research in next-generation VR devices, to construct variable resolution and desktop/office-sized displays. 

About the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA): 
NCSA is a national high-performance computing center that develops and deploys cutting-edge computing, networking and information technologies. Located at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign UIUC), NCSA is funded by the National Science Foundation. Additional support comes from the state of Illinois, the University of Illinois, private sector partners and other federal agencies. 

For More Information Please Contact: 
Trish Barker 
National Center for Supercomputing Applications 
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

&ldquo;Continuum&rdquo; Supports Distributed Scientists In Intensive Collaborative Sessions

Those who attended the exhibition of VROOM at the proceedings of Siggraph &rsquo;94, experienced the possibilities of scientific visualization in computational science and engineering with emphasis on interactive, collaborative problem-solving. Virtual environments enabled participants to view, enter and interact with massive datasets. They could become smaller than an atom or larger than the universe; stand in the middle of a thunderstorm or travel through the human bloodstream. 

Over 40 projects were exhibited during four days of demonstrations, involving more than 200 researchers. The demonstrations used CAVE and BOOM technologies, transmitted over local high-speed networks, using massive datastores, superworkstations, supercomputers, and scientific instrumentation. The primary goal of VROOM was to encourage the development of teams, tools, hardware, system software, and human interface models. New interaction paradigms for virtual environments, tuned to science and engineering emerged. 

Attendees gained a vision of the 90&rsquo;s scientific &ldquo;cyberworkspace&rdquo;. VR experiences enable researchers to interactively explore their scientific domains, play &ldquo;what if&rdquo; games by modifying their codes, and view the resulting visualizations. VR is recognized as an &ldquo;intelligent user interface&rdquo; to the emerging National Information Infrastructure, that will enable computational scientists and engineers to access HPCC enabling technologies and put the &ldquo;human in the loop&rdquo; for timely data analysis and understanding. 

Additional EVL applications are as follows (also see &lsquo;related research&rsquo; links below): 
CitySpace 
Computational Modeling for Crash-Worthiness 
Simulation of a Grinding Process 
Visualization of Casting Process 
Using VR for Machine Design 
Scientific Visualization of Gyrofluid Tokamak Turbulence 
Getting Physical in Four Dimensions 
Topological Surface Deformation 
Detour 
The Virtual Eye 
Weakly Electric Fish Electric Organ Discharge 
JASON Interactive Mapper 
Post-Euclidean Walkabout

VROOM - The Virtual Reality Room :: Exhibition at Siggraph

This years SC04 Conference, Pittsburgh, PA November 6 - 12 will include SC Global, which consists of a series of sessions designed to showcase a broad range of Access Grid technology applications that range from the scientific to the artistic. 

Two sessions will include EVL demonstrations on-site at SC Global, which will also be hosted live from EVL. The Virtual Reality SC Global session will include a demonstration of how EVL&rsquo;s ImmersaView was integrated into the Access Grid; broadcast time scheduled at EVL, Tuesday, November 9, 3:20-4:00 PM CST. Another VR session (2:30 - 3:20pm CST) originates from Purdue and will showcase how the <a href="http://www.envision.purdue.edu/papers/SC04-stereo-AG/">VRJuggler toolkit</a> can be integrated into the Access Grid to provide a collaborative space. Both VR sessions will rely on GeoWall technology, developed at EVL. 

Raj Singh&rsquo;s collaborative TeraVision software used in conjunction with the Access Grid will be broadcast from Pittsburgh to EVL and other remote sites Thursday, November 11, 10:30 - 11:00am CST. 

See the SC Conference SC Global sessions line up for further <a href="http://www.sc-conference.org/sc2004/scglobal.html">scheduling details</a>.

SC Global 2004 AG Sessions Hosted Live to EVL

EVL is part of the OptIPuter project, which has a large presence at this year&rsquo;s <a href="http://www.sc-conference.org/sc2004/">SC 2004</a> conference. 

The <a href="http://www.optiputer.net">OptIPuter</a>, so named for its use of Optical networking, Internet Protocol, computer storage, processing and visualization technologies, is an envisioned infrastructure that will tightly couple computational resources over parallel optical networks using the IP communication mechanism. The OptIPuter exploits a new world in which the central architectural element is optical networking, not computers - creating &ldquo;supernetworks&rdquo;. The goal of this new architecture is to enable scientists who are generating terabytes and petabytes of data to interactively visualize, analyze, and correlate their data from multiple storage sites connected to optical networks. Specifically, the OptIPuter&rsquo;s broad multidisciplinary team is conducting experiments with two data-intensive e-science efforts to ensure a useful and usable OptIPuter design: EarthScope efforts at the UCSD Scripps Institution of Oceanography, funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), and the Biomedical Informatics Research Network (BIRN) efforts at the UCSD National Center for Microscopy and Imaging Research, funded by the National Institutes of Health. Other groups, notably the USGS EDC and NASA, look to the OptIPuter project to provide the necessary leadership in developing and deploying next-generation affordable, interactive, large-scale display and Earth science analysis technologies. The OptIPuter receives major funding from NSF ITR cooperative agreement SCI-0225642 to UCSD. 

Below is a list of OptIPuter-related research demonstrations and presentations by EVL and its partners that are taking place during the week of the conference. 

RESEARCH EXHIBITION DEMONSTRATIONS 
<ul>
<li>National LambdaRail booth #1153<ul>
<li>Scalable Adaptive Graphics Environment (<a href="http://www.evl.uic.edu/cavern/sage/">SAGE</a>) 
University of Illinois at Chicago, Electronic Visualization Laboratory</li>
<li>Trans-Pacific HDTV 
University of California, San Diego, National Center for Microscopy and Imaging Research (UCSD / NCMIR) and Biomedical Informatics Research Network (UCSD / BIRN)</li>
<li>OptIPuter Middleware: Terabyte Data Juggling and DVC Framework</li>
<li>University of California, San Diego, Concurrent Systems Architecture Group</li>
<li>UDT Fairness and Friendliness Demo 
University of Illinois at Chicago, National Center for Data Mining</li>
<li>NASA High-Volume Data Displays 
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (NASA / GSFC), Scientific Visualization Studio</li>
</ul> </li>
<li>National Center for Data Mining (NCDM) booth #653<ul>
<li>Data Stream Merge 
University of Illinois at Chicago, National Center for Data Mining</li>
<li>Photonic Data Services 
University of Illinois at Chicago, National Center for Data Mining Northwestern University, International Center for Advanced Internet Research</li>
</ul> </li>
<li>Dutch booth #2150<ul>
<li>High-Resolution Grid-Enabled Visualization for Life Sciences and Climate Modeling 
SARA Computing and Networking Services</li>
</ul> </li>
<li>Nortel Networks booth #1333<ul>
<li>International Wavelength / Lightpath Switching Using Distributed Control Planes 
Northwestern University, International Center for Advanced Internet Research, University of Amsterdam</li>
<li>DWDM: Data-Intensive Computational Grid Services Enabled by Dynamic Switched Wavelengths 
Northwestern University, International Center for Advanced Internet Research</li>
</ul> </li>
<li>University of Southern California booth #2649<ul>
<li>Grid-Based Visualization Framework 
University of Southern California, Information Sciences Institute</li>
</ul> </li>
<li>National Center for Supercomputing Applications (<a href="http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/">NCSA</a>) booth #548<ul>
<li>Stereo Visualization of Jet Instabilities in Stratified Fluid 
NCSA Visualization Group</li>
<li>OptIPuter (presentation) 
Tom DeFanti, University of Illinois at Chicago, Electronic Visualization Laboratory</li>
</ul> </li>
</ul> 

PAPERS 

Xin Liu (UCSD), Andrew Chien (UCSD), &ldquo;Realistic Large-Scale Online Network Simulation,&rdquo; Wednesday, November 10, 10:30 - 11:00am 

Oliver T. Yu (University of Illinois at Chicago), Thomas A. DeFanti (University of Illinois at Chicago), &ldquo;Collaborative User-Centric Lambda-Grid over Wavelength-Routed Network,&rdquo; November 10, 11:00 - 11:30am 

Yunhong Gu (University of Illinois at Chicago), Xinwei Hong (University of Illinois at Chicago), Robert L. Grossman (University of Illinois at Chicago), &ldquo;Experiences in Design and Implementation of a High Performance Transport Protocol,&rdquo; Tuesday, November 09, 03:30 - 04:00pm 

PANELS 

Speakers: Peter Clarke (University College London, UK), Thomas A. DeFanti (University of Illinois at Chicago), Jun Murai (Keio University, Japan), Kees Neggers (SURFnet bv, The Netherlands), Bill St. Arnaud (CANARIE, Canada). 

Chair: Maxine Brown (UIC), &ldquo;GLIF Infrastructure - Why Do We Need 10Gbps Networks?,&rdquo; Friday, November 12, 10:30am - 12:00pm 

MASTERWORKS 

Philip Papadopoulos (UC San Diego / San Diego Supercomputer Center), &ldquo;The OptIPuter: Experimental Hybrid Network Structure and Emerging Software Services for Lambda-enabled Computers,&rdquo; Thursday, November 11, 10:30 - 11:15am 

John Orcutt (Scripps Institution of Oceanography), &ldquo;Cyber Infrastructure in the Earth Sciences - A Necessary and Timely Collaboration,&rdquo; Thursday, November 11, 11:15am - 12:00pm 

SC GLOBAL 

SC Global Keynote: Larry Smarr (California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology and Harry E. Gruber Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, UC San Diego), &ldquo;Towards a Planetary Collaboratory,&rdquo; Tuesday, November 09, 10:30am - 12:00pm 

Allan Spale (University of Illinois at Chicago), &ldquo;ImmersaView Launcher: A Shared AG Application&rdquo; Tuesday, November 09, 04:20 - 05:00pm 

Raj Singh (UIC), &ldquo;TeraVision: High bandwidth, collaborative video streaming on the Access Grid,&rdquo; Thursday, November 11, 11:30am - 12:00pm 

CONFERENCE KEYNOTE 

Keynote Talk: Tom West (President and CEO of the National LambdaRail), &ldquo;NLR: Providing the Nationwide Network Infrastructure for Network and &lsquo;Big Science&rsquo; Research,&rdquo; Tuesday, November 09, 08:30 - 09:30am

EVL at SC 2004

EVL alumnus and Assistant Professor in the Department of Media Study of the University at Buffalo, Dave Pape collaborated with artist Jackie Matisse on &ldquo;Art Flying In &amp; Out of Space&rdquo;,now on exhibit at <a href="http://www.zonechelsea.org">ZONE: Chelsea Center for the Arts</a>, through June 24, 2005. The piece appears along with other Jackie Matisse works spanning 20 years, including her famous hand-made kites and kite tails, mobiles, collages, assemblages, and graphic works. Also on exhibit are video presentations of her collaborative projects, including &ldquo;Tailing a Dream&rdquo; with composer David Tudor and film maker Molly Davies. 

Matisse&rsquo;s &ldquo;Kites Flying In &amp; Out of Space&rdquo; was originally developed in collaboration with NCSA, EVL / UIC, and Virginia Tech as a CAVE application for iGrid2002 in Amsterdam. It explored the physical properties of flying kites in virtual reality whose movements were driven by the bandwidth usage of several collaborative applications running over high-speed networks. 

Matisse&rsquo;s &ldquo;Art Flying In &amp; Out of Space&rdquo; is a flat-screen, interactive stereoscopic installation, which continues her experimental work in supercomputing and virtual reality. 

The exhibition will open with a reception for the artist on Thursday, May 26th, from 6:00pm - 8:00pm Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 10:00am - 5:00pm. 

To learn more about this exhibition please contact the gallery at (212) 255 2177 or by email: info @ zonechelsea.org

Jackie Matisse: New Art Volant

Daniel J. Sandin is director of the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) and a professor in the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), and an adjunct professor at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). His early interest in real-time computer graphics / video image processing and interactive computing environments motivated his pioneering work in video synthesizers and continues to influence his research interests. 

As co-director of EVL, Sandin also directs research in: virtual environments, digital libraries, scientific visualization, new methodologies for informal science and engineering education, paradigms for information display, tele-visualization (distributed graphics over networks), algorithm optimization for massively parallel computing, sonification, human / computer interfaces, and abstract mathematical visualization. He also is receiving recognition, along with EVL co-director Tom DeFanti, for conceiving the CAVE virtual reality theater in 1991. 

Sandin&rsquo;s computer / video art has been exhibited at conferences and museums worldwide, and he has received many awards. Sandin has received many grants and fellowships from such distinguished organizations as the Rockefeller Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts; and, his work is included in the inaugural collection of video art at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. 

Presentation: 
The techniques and poetics of a SHD (Super High Definition) quaternion Julia set animation. 

Dan will speak about the mathematics of Julia set and quaterions, SHD format, abstract mathematical visualizations and animation time structure. 

Related URL: 
<a href="http://www.evl.uic.edu/hypercomplex/">www.evl.uic.edu/hypercomplex/</a>

Quaternion Julia Sets

Daniel Sandin - EVL Seminar Presentation

EVL&rsquo;s Jason Leigh and Luc Renambot participated in the <a href="http://cs.illinois.edu/">2005 NSF CISE / CNS Cluster Computing Infrastructure Experience Workshop</a>, hosted by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign&rsquo;s (UIUC) National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), and gave a presentation on the construction of the <a href="http://www.evl.uic.edu/core.php?mod=4&amp;type=4&amp;indi=351">105 Megapixel LambdaVision display</a> used for <a href="http://www.optiputer.net/index.html">OptIPuter</a>.

LambdaVision (105 Mpixels) LCD-based display

2005 NSF CISE / CNS Cluster Computing Infrastructure Experience Workshop

Researchers from the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL), collaborated with researchers at the California Institute for Telecommunictions and Information Technology (<a href="http://www.calit2.net">Calit2</a>) at UCSD and the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (<a href="http://cisto.gsfc.nasa.gov/IRAD_Lambda.html">GSFC</a>), using Optiputer on a new 10-Gigabit per second (Gbps) National LambdaRail, linking NASA research center to UCSD. During the Live Demonstration of 21st Century National-Scale Team Science, scientists were allowed to establish high-definition telepresence, while also collaborating in real time on visualizing massive amounts of remote land and weather data. The software framework driving the large tiled display at GFSC - the HyperWall, was the Scalable Adaptive Graphics Environment (<a href="http://www.evl.uic.edu/core.php?mod=4&amp;type=1&amp;indi=281">SAGE</a>), developed at EVL. <a href="http://www.evl.uic.edu/core.php?mod=4&amp;type=1&amp;indi=222">Teravision</a> and <a href="http://www.evl.uic.edu/core.php?mod=4&amp;type=1&amp;indi=242">Juxtaview</a>, two other applications developed at EVL, were also operated using SAGE.

Christa Peters-Lidard, a GSFC hydrologist, in front of a HyperWall which displays data residing on an Optiputer cluster, using the National LambdaRail

Live Demonstration of 21st Century National-Scale Team Science

Glimmerglass Switches To Be Featured in Upcoming iGrid 2005 Conference 

Glimmerglass, a provider of automated fiber management solutions, announced today that the National Science Foundation-funded OptIPuter project has purchased its intelligent optical switch to cross-connect all single mode fiber connections in the OptIPuter 10Gb/s optical network backbone, connected to the National LambdaRail (NLR). 

The Glimmerglass switch, already in place in OptIPuter&rsquo;s University of Illinois facility, has been mirrored in the project&rsquo;s University of California, San Diego facility (UCSD). The OptIPuter project, named for its use of optical networking, Internet Protocol, as well as computer storage, processing and visualization, was created to explore and implement &ldquo;supernetworks&rdquo; in which the central architectural element is optical networks, not computers. 

The Glimmerglass switch at UCSD supports 128x128 (input x output fibers) and will serve in featured demonstrations at iGrid 2005, an international grid conference, September 26 - 29 in San Diego, Calif. Demonstrations will include real-time, multi-scale brain data assembly, acquisition and analysis between collaborative but geographically dispersed centers; parallel interactive 3D visualization of earth science interest; and use of global lambdas for particle physics analysis. 

&ldquo;The Glimmerglass optical switches allow us to automatically control extremely large, extremely complex networks and to pre-configure different network architectures that can be called and loaded on demand,&rdquo; said Larry Smarr, director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2), a partnership of UCSD and UC Irvine, and principal investigator on the OptIPuter project. &ldquo;We can dynamically re-allocate a light path in seconds. This is a huge time-saver for us and critical for conducting important network tests.&rdquo; 

&ldquo;I&rsquo;m very impressed with the innovative work from Larry and his OptIPuter team,&rdquo; said Robert Lundy, Glimmerglass CEO. &ldquo;Grid technology and the OptIPuter project are giving us all a glimpse into what&rsquo;s possible using massively parallel, dynamically reconfigurable optical networks. We&rsquo;re proud to be part of it.&rdquo; 

About OptIPuter 
The OptIPuter is a five-year, $13.5 million project funded by the National Science Foundation. It will enable scientists who are generating massive amounts of data to interactively visualize, analyze, and correlate their data from multiple storage sites connected to optical networks. UCSD and UIC lead the research team, in partnership with researchers at Northwestern University, San Diego State University, the Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California, and UC Irvine, with multiple industry partners. For more information, go to the OptIPuter website at <a href="http://www.optiputer.net">www.optiputer.net</a>. 

About Glimmerglass 
Glimmerglass offers a new approach to managing fiber infrastructure. Its customers achieve an ROI in just a few months rather than over several years as with conventional equipment. Glimmerglass&rsquo; intelligent optical switch enables customers to automatically, remotely and instantly monitor and manage fiber optic connections in a wide range of applications. For more information about Glimmerglass, visit <a href="http://www.glimmerglass.com">www.glimmerglass.com</a>. 

About iGrid 2005 
The International Grid ( iGrid) collaborative event showcases ongoing global collaborations in middleware development and applications research that require high-performance multi-gigabit networks. The iGrids are organized every two or three years by institutions, organizations, consortia and National Research &amp; Education Networks who also participate in the Global Lambda Integrated Facility (GLIF). Overall planning responsibilities for iGrid 2005 are being handled by the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) at the University of California, San Diego, in cooperation with the Mathematics and Computer Science Division of Argonne National Laboratory, SURFnet, University of Amsterdam, and CANARIE. For more information, see <a href="http://www.igrid2005.org">www.igrid2005.org</a>. 

Media Contacts: 
Pam Crowley: 
Crowley Communications: 
408.529.9655: 
pamc @ crowleypr.com: 

Doug Ramsey: 
UCSD / Calit2 / iGrid: 
858.822.5825: 
dramsey @ ucsd.edu: 

Glimmerglass is a trademark of Glimmerglass Networks, Inc.: 
All other trademarks and service marks are the property of their respective holders.

Glimmerglass/iGrid2005

Glimmerglass Optical Switch to Power 10Gb/s Connections on OptIPuter&rsquo;s Local and National Supercomputing Network

Six universities and research laboratories present InterPlay: Loose Minds in a Box at the Supercomputing Global 2005 Conference in Seattle Washington on November 17 at 11:15am PST. This InterPlay is a multi-faceted telematic event that consists of six simultaneous performances that occur in six states throughout North America. The sites include the University of Utah Center for High Performance Computing in partnership with Another Language Performing Arts Company, the University of Alaska, Fairbanks and the Arctic Region Supercomputing Center, the University of Montana, Missoula, Envision Center for Data Perceptualization at Purdue University, the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at University of Illinois, Chicago and the University of Maryland, College Park. The distributed performances incorporate theater, text, music, performance art, virtual reality, and motion capture and are concurrently mixed, encoded and streamed onto Internet 2. 

Loose Minds in a Box, first performed on April 15 - 17, 2005, is a collaborative work that explores the basic concept of the &ldquo;box&rdquo;. The box is a metaphor for the physical, social, political or psychological constraints that we and/or others place upon us. The box also represents a sense of place in the realm of the virtual as well as in our sub-conscience. With the aid of performance artists, electro-acoustic musicians / composers, virtual reality and motion capture artists / technologists and others; we look at many of the numerous representations the &ldquo;box&rdquo; encompasses. 

In Seattle, Another Language&rsquo;s Artistic Director, Beth Miklavcic, as display operator, will manipulate / maneuver the InterPlay experience with creative choreography of the video streams across thirty-six feet of projection screen surface while her recorded performance of her work, Dressers, investigates how the clothes we wear bind our personalities. Sculptor, Erik Brown, will construct an enclosure around himself depicting how we encase ourselves in a social fortress. It either protects us from unwanted human contact or keeps us from interacting with the outside world. 

In Maryland, Nadja Masura, Moira Jackson and Peter Rogers perform within the constraining characteristics of the video box as well as augmenting Beth Miklavcic&rsquo;s &ldquo;clothes encounter&rdquo; by changing their personalities with new fashions. 

A team of artists in Indiana include Dioselin Gonzalez (VR designer), T. J. Rogers (motion performance), Carol Cunningham (choreographer), David Sigman (graphic designer) and Joe Hayes (dancer). They will delve into the virtual box where a performer transmits him self through a bazaar world of unique characters and environments, created by Miho Aoki in Alaska and David Sigman. At times, Joe Hayes will remotely control, through movement, electro-acoustic music in Montana. 

Artists Tina Shah and Helen-Nicole Kostis in Chicago, Illinois will explore the concept of isolated confinement, while at the same time exposing the metamorphosis of the performer&rsquo;s psyche in a VR world. 

Charles Nichols, composer and violinist in Missoula Montana, will probe the musical possibilities of the &ldquo;black box&rdquo;. Scott Deal, composer and percussionist in Fairbanks Alaska will toy with numerous box icons such as Pandora&rsquo;s Box. The music is transmitted to all sites in real time, encompassing the entire work with piercing percussion and wild melodies. 

In the Washington State Conference Center, director Jimmy Miklavcic, will wrangle more than twenty video streams from all six sites, mix and process them for the local Seattle audience and then stream the processed videos back onto Internet2 for audiences at the five participating sites and other Access Grid sites. 

Technical support is provided by David Krnavek, Donavan Keinenberger and Eric Peterson (Alaska), Nancy Cope (Purdue), Sam Liston (Utah), Chris Rosenthal, Jonathan Rosenthal and Gideon Goldman (Illinois), Robert Wachtel (Montana) and Paul Jackson (Maryland), Cindy Seivers, Jeff Schwab and Jim Miller (Seattle). 

Another Language, in collaboration with all the participating artists and technologists, is forging a new performance form. InterPlay: Loose Minds in a Box is the most innovative merging of Internet technology with the performing arts to date. The form brings together artists from unique backgrounds and geographical locations that would normally never occur under traditional collaborative processes. The power of the Internet and videoconference technology enables and empowers this consortium of artists to expand their ideas of artistic creativity. The performance can be viewed through either QuickTime or Windows Media at <a href="http://www.anotherlanguage.org/interplay">www.anotherlanguage.org/interplay</a> or <a href="http://artgrid.chpc.utah.edu">artgrid.chpc.utah.edu</a>. 

Loose Minds in a Box is supported in part by the University of Utah Center for High Performance Computing, University of Alaska, Fairbanks, Artic Region Supercomputing Center, University of Montana, the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at University of Illinois, Chicago, the Envision Center for Data Perceptualization at Purdue University, the University of Maryland, the Salt Lake County Zoo, Arts and Parks Program, the Utah Arts Council and the Salt Lake City Arts Council and contributing members of Another Language.

Interplay, Loose Minds in a Box still from the main mix

Interplay: Loose Minds in a Boxat SC05

EVL participates at SC|05 as an OptIPuter partner in the National LambdaRail booth (#6003), showcasing hardware and software developed with major support from the National Science Foundation. 

H A R D W A R E 

<a href="http://www.evl.uic.edu/cavern/optiputer/geowall2.html">GeoWall2</a> 
The GeoWall2 is a portable, high-resolution (8000 x 3600 pixels) 15- tile LCD system powered by a 10-node OptIPuter 64bit cluster. Applications of GeoWall2 include the visualization of large remote sensing data, scientific volume rendering imagery, mapping, seismic interpretation, museum exhibits and other applications that require a large collaborative screen area. 

The GeoWall2 was designed and built at the University of Illinois at Chicago&rsquo;s Electronic Visualization Laboratory with funding from the National Science Foundation. The GeoWall2 on display at SC|05 is on loan from OptIPuter partner USGS / EROS Data Center in Sioux Falls, SD. 

Varrier Auto-Stereoscopic Virtual Reality Display 
Daniel J. Sandin, Thomas A. DeFanti, Jinghua Ge, Javier Girado, Robert Kooima and Tom Peterka 
Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL), University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) 
Contact: dan @ evl.uic.edu 

Varrier is a high-resolution, head-tracked autostereoscopic display system that produces a virtual reality immersive experience without requiring the user to wear any encumbrances. Varrier refers to both the display system, and the computational method used to produce the autostereoscopic imagery through a combination of a physical parallax barrier and a virtual barrier. Camera-based head tracking with artificial neural networks is used to track user head position at interactive frame rates. 

Varrier was designed and built at University of Illinois at Chicago&rsquo;s Electronic Visualization Laboratory with funding from the National Science Foundation. It is a 35-panel tiled display that produces a wide field of view, head-tracked virtual reality experience. The Varrier system at SC|05 is a single 30 panel display. 

Networked and local application demonstrations include: a U.S. Geological Survey topological map of Crater Lake; a live 3D teleconferencing session from EVL in Chicago, Illinois; Mars Rover data; photon-beam tomography by Marcus Thi&eacute;baux, Information Sciences Institute, University of Southern California; and animated microscopy imaging by Steve Lamont, National Center for Microscopy and Imaging Research, University of California, San Diego. 

S O F T W A R E 

<a href="http://www.evl.uic.edu/cavern/sage">Scalable Adaptive Graphics Environment (SAGE)</a> 
Luc Renambot, Jason Leigh, Byungil Jeong, Andrew Johnson, Nicholas Schwarz and Venkatram Vishwanath 
Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL), University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) 

The Scalable Adaptive Graphics Environment (SAGE) is a graphics streaming architecture for supporting collaborative scientific visualization environments with potentially hundreds of megapixels of contiguous display resolution is a distributed computing architecture that supports easy migration of visualization tools between computing environments. SAGE addresses both heterogeneity and scalability by decoupling graphics rendering from graphics display, and uses high bandwidth networking to bridge them. 

The SAGE architecture consists of numerous rendering resources connected over a high-speed network to a scalable frame buffer. The hardware is built from commodity hardware components that can be arranged to scaled to manage any resolution of display screen. Using SAGE, multiple datasets applications can be visualized simultaneously on a large tiled display. This is achieved by executing multiple instances of an application, then comparing lets the user compare and analyze multiple the datasets, or multiple views of the same dataset. SAGE application windows can be moved, resized and overlapped like any standard desktop window manager. 

SAGE streaming capabilities currently enable users to visualize remotely stored datasets from several distributed clusters over wide area networks and display them on the local tiled display. SAGE is now being extended to support distance collaboration with multiple endpoints, by streaming pixels to all the participants using either traditional router-based multicasting or photonic multicasting. This will allow, once the multicasting capability is added to SAGE, distributed collaborators using different displays to effectively share the same visualization data without wasting network bandwidth. 

EVL is also developing LambdaRAM middleware, new streaming protocols and real-time compression modules to improve SAGE&rsquo;s pixel streaming capabilities. Ultimately, SAGE will be extended to stream other graphics data types to support a wider range of applications, and SAGE applications will rely on LambdaRAM to access large datasets. 

LambdaRAM allows applications to seamlessly access very large remote datasets over high-bandwidth networks, and overcome the large latencies that are characteristic of long haul networks. LambdaRAM harnesses the memory of multiple distributed wide-area clusters and presents a single global memory abstraction to the application. It also employs aggressive pre-fetching heuristics based on access patterns to cache data for applications. This helps tremendously to overcome latency - a critical requirement in large remote data visualization and data mining. 

At SC|05, SAGE is supporting the following applications on the GeoWall2: HDTV live streaming from EVL in Chicago; JuxtaView (UCSD/ NCMIR microscopy data and USGS Urban Area datasets); Magic Carpet (New Orleans, San Diego and Blue Marble datasets); and UIUC / NCSA and EVL HD animations.

GeoWall2

EVL Showcases Research in NLR Exhibit at SC &rsquo;05

RESEARCH EXHIBITS 
Calit2 and Center for Earth Observations and Applications (booth 6107) 
Transforming Scientific Discovery Through Telecom and IT 
UCSD Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Center for Earth Observations and Applications 
Contact: Atul Nayak, anayak @ ucsd.edu 

OptIPuter Education &amp; Outreach 
UCSD Scripps Institution of Oceanography 
Contact: Debi Kilb, dkilb @ epicenter.ucsd.edu 

Dutch Consortium Booth (booth 2444) 
Technology for Optical Pixel Streaming (TOPS) 
SARA Computing and Networking Services (The Netherlands) 
Contact: Paul Wielinga, wielinga @ sara.nl, Axel Berg, axel @ sara.nl 

Resource Brokering: Your Ticket into NetherLight 
University of Amsterdam, Advanced Internet Research Group (The Netherlands) 
Contact: Cees de Laat, delaat @ science.uva.nl 

StarPlane (poster) 
University of Amsterdam, Advanced Internet Research Group (The Netherlands) 
Contact: Cees de Laat, delaat @ science.uva.nl 

National Center for Data Mining (booth 2430) 
Exploring Remote and Distributed Data Using Teraflows 
University of Illinois at Chicago, National Center for Data Mining 
Northwestern University, International Center for Advanced Internet Research 
CERN 
Kyushu Institute of Technology (Japan) 
Queen&rsquo;s University (Canada) 
University of Amsterdam, Advanced Internet Research Group (The Netherlands) 
Contact: Robert Grossman, grossman @ uic.edu, Joe Mambretti, j-mambretti @ northwestern.edu 

From Federal Express to Lambdas: Transporting SDSS Data Using UDT 
University of Illinois at Chicago, National Center for Data Mining 
Johns Hopkins University 
Chinese Academy of Science, Department of Astronomy (China) 
Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute (Korea) 
Max Plank Institut fuer Plasmaphysik (Germany) 
National Astronomical Observatory (China) 
University of Tokyo, School of Science (Japan) 
Contact: Robert Grossman, grossman @ uic.edu 

National Center for Supercomputing Applications (booth 1639) 
High Definition Stereo Streaming 
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, National Center for Supercomputing Applications 
University of Illinois at Chicago, Electronic Visualization Laboratory 
Contact: Donna Cox, cox @ ncsa.uiuc.edu, Bob Patterson, robertp @ ncsa.uiuc.edu 

National LambdaRail (booth 6003) 
Scalable Adaptive Graphics Environment 
University of Illinois at Chicago, Electronic Visualization Laboratory 
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, National Center for Supercomputing Applications 
SARA Computing and Networking Services (The Netherlands) 
UCSD National Center for Microscopy and Imaging Research 
Contact: Jason Leigh, spiff @ evl.uic.edu, Luc Renambot, luc @ evl.uic.edu 

Personal Varrier 
University of Illinois at Chicago, Electronic Visualization Laboratory 
Contact: Dan Sandin, dan @ uic.edu 

Nortel Networks (booth 540) 
International Optical Multicast 
Northwestern University, International Center for Advanced Internet Research 
Nortel Networks 
SARA Computing and Networking Services 
SURFnet6 
University of Amsterdam, Advanced Internet Research Group (The Netherlands) 
Contact: Joe Mambretti, j-mambretti @ northwestern.edu 

The Virtual Machine* 
Nortel Networks 
University of Amsterdam, Advanced Internet Research Laboratory 
Contact: Cees de Laat, delaat @ science.uva.nl 

Token-Based Networking* 
Nortel Networks 
University of Amsterdam, Advanced Internet Research Group (The Netherlands) 
Contact: Cees de Laat, delaat @ science.uva.nl 

* Application presentations taking place in the Dutch Consortium booth. 

University of Southern California (USC) (booth 652) 
Grid Visualization Toolkit with SCEC Data USC Information Sciences Institute 
USC Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC) 
Contact: Marcus Thiebaux, thiebaux @ isi.edu 

STORCLOUD 
Interactive Remote Visualization of Large High-Resolution Time-Varying Geophysical and Biological Datasets: LambdaRAM and LambdaStream 
University of Illinois at Chicago, Electronic Visualization Laboratory 
Contact: Venkatram Vishwanath, venkat @ evl.uic.edu 

TECHNICAL PAPERS 
Supporting Configurable Congestion Control in Data Transport Service 
Yunhong Gu, Robert Grossman 
University of Illinois at Chicago, National Center for Data Mining 
Contact: Yunhong Gu, Robert Grossman, grossman @ uic.edu 

MASTERWORKS 
The Strategic Future of Data and the Mining of Massive Data Sets - Part 1 
Robert Grossman 
University of Illinois at Chicago, National Center for Data Mining 
Contact: Robert Grossman, grossman @ uic.edu 

TUTORIALS 
A Tutorial Introduction to High Performance Analytics 
Robert Grossman, Vipin Kumar and Steve Eick 
University of Illinois at Chicago, National Center for Data Mining 
University of Minnesota 
Contact: Robert Grossman, grossman @ uic.edu 

GRID 2005: 6th IEEE / ACM International Workshop on Grid Computing 
Web Services and Grid Security Vulnerabilities and Threats Analysis and Model (poster) 
Yuri Demchenko, Leon Gommans, Cees de Laat, Bas van Oudenaarde 
University of Amsterdam, Advanced Internet Research Group (The Netherlands) 
Cees de Laat, delaat @ science.uva.nl 

The OptIPuter 

A Powerful Distributed Cyberinfrastructure to Support Data-Intensive Scientific Research and Collaboration 
<a href="http://www.optiputer.net">www.optiputer.net</a> 

Academic Partners 
Calit2 (California Institute of Telecommunications and Information Technology): University of California, San Diego and University of California, Irvine Northwestern University 
San Diego State University 
Texas A&amp;M University 
University of Southern California&rsquo;s Information Sciences Institute 
University of Illinois at Chicago 
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, National Center for Supercomputing Applications 

Affiliate Partners 
NASA 
US Geological Survey, National Center for Earth Resources Observation and Science 
CANARIE 
SARA Computing and Networking Services (The Netherlands) 
University of Amsterdam (The Netherlands) 
KISTI (Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information) (Korea) 
AIST (National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology), (Japan) 

Industrial Partners 
Big Bandwidth 
Calient Networks, Inc. 
Chiaro Networks, Inc. 
Glimmerglass Networks, Inc. 
IBM 
Lucent Technologies 
Sun Microsystems
Telcordia Technologies 

Collaborators 
CENIC (Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California) 
Centro de Investigaci&oacute;n Cientifica y de Educaci&oacute;n Superior de Ensenada (CICESE) 
National LambdaRail 
San Diego Telecom Council

TeraVision Streams Displayed on Tiled Display

OptIPuter Exhibited at SC05

As a number of large-scale, multinational experiments prepare to go online in the next 2-3 years, a new generation of data retrieval and transmission techniques and tools will be required. The data yielded by these experiments will be prolific, and a diverse, globally distributed community of scientists will be eager to acquire and explore this data. 

Computer scientists at the University of Illinois at Chicago&rsquo;s (UIC) Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) are working to give application scientists &ldquo;user-friendly&rdquo; options for transferring large datasets over wide-area networks; one such research effort focuses on the development of specialized application-level transport protocols. 

Today, most research and education networks are shared, and operate as &ldquo;best effort&rdquo;, with multiple routers, data paths and dynamic packet reassignment decisions that provide an equitable sharing among many users of bandwidth, but a less-than-optimal handling of cluster-computer-initiated data flows in the multi-hundred-megabit and multi-gigabit range. The current cost of routers makes it prohibitive to permanently optimize and dedicate a routed network infrastructure among specific sites that have large bursts of traffic, but are not utilizing the full bandwidth continuously. An alternative networking model, one which relies upon less costly switches, can be dedicated, and as such provide applications with known and knowable characteristics, such as guaranteed bandwidth (for data movement), guaranteed latency (for visualization, collaboration and data analysis) and guaranteed scheduling (for remote instruments). 

EVL is conducting application-level protocol research so applications can maximally exploit the available bandwidth, whether a network is routed, switched or both (hybrid). A &ldquo;fairness factor&rdquo; is being designed into this new generation of protocols to avoid forcing the data through and interfering with existing traffic. &ldquo;For the past five years, we have been designing specialized transport protocols or data-intensive interactive visualization and streaming media applications, where low latency and high reliability are of utmost importance,&rdquo; said EVL co-director <a href="http://www.evl.uic.edu/core.php?mod=4&amp;type=5&amp;indi=29">Jason Leigh</a>. 

This January, EVL researchers began testing whether data-intensive science can effectively use hybrid networks to move large files effectively using its specialized, application-level, UDP transport protocol called <a href="http://www.evl.uic.edu/core.php?mod=4&amp;type=1&amp;indi=284">LambdaStream</a>. 

EVL ran cluster-to-cluster file-transfer tests to determine whether the same network performance obtained over Layer-2 (switched) networks could be obtained with dedicated 10Gbps paths on Layer-3 (routed) networks using LambdaStream. The tests specifically compared throughput over a TeraGrid 10Gbps SONET-routed network using MultiProtocol Label Switching (MPLS) between Chicago and San Diego, and CAVEwave, a 10Gbps switched LAN PHY network between the same locations. 

The file-transfer programs invoked LambdaStream to send multiple 1Gbps data streams over each of these networks to saturate the 10Gbps links for 30-60 minute intervals. The dataset used was a 1-foot-resolution map of 5,000 square miles of the city of Chicago provided by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) National Center for Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS). The map consists of 3,000 files of tiled images that are 75MBytes each, for a total of 220GBytes of information. 

EVL performed three different LambdaStream tests over the TeraGrid and CAVEwave networks: moving data from memory to memory, from disk to memory, and from disk to disk; the three ways scientists typically use networks to access data. The measured performance across CAVEwave and <a href="http://www.teragrid.org">TeraGrid</a> was comparable, proving that a routed and non-routed infrastructure could both sustain near 10Gbps and behave the same when a specialized protocol is used. 

The January tests also affirmed that a switched, end-to-end dedicated wavelength is a reliable alternative to shared networks when transferring high-throughput scientific application data. 

As partners in the National Science Foundation&rsquo;s <a href="http://www.evl.uic.edu/core.php?mod=4&amp;type=1&amp;indi=236">OptIPuter</a> project, EVL and the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) are proving it is economical to have point-to-point connections once you have the right endpoint technologies in place. &ldquo;We are propagating a scalable, economical networking solution that puts high-performance networking resources into the control of individual scientists,&rdquo; said <a href="http://www.evl.uic.edu/core.php?mod=4&amp;type=5&amp;indi=10">Tom DeFanti</a>, EVL co-director and OptIPuter program co-PI. &ldquo;Lambda services offer scientists a networking means to solve problems that are cost prohibitive to do any other way.&rdquo; 

EVL is one of a few laboratories in the United States today that has access to its own persistent transcontinental 10GE optical connection, called the CAVEwave, on the National LambdaRail (NLR). CAVEwave extends from the StarLight optical Internet exchange in downtown Chicago, to the Pacific Northwest GigaPoP (PNWGP) in Seattle, to the UCSD campus. This link allows scientists at both ends to test experimental protocols and tools, and supports high-end networked application demonstrations. 

LAMBDASTREAM EXPERIMENT DETAILS 
A 30-node cluster at EVL connects to an in-house switch that aggregates traffic and sends it to a Force10 optical switch at StarLight. At UCSD, campus fibers connect the CAVEwave to a 28-node cluster in the Calit2 building. This configuration enables research among Chicago, San Diego, the University of Washington, and international colleagues who connect to the PNWGP via Pacific Wave on the U.S. west coast, or to StarLight in Chicago. 

The StarLight Force10 switch that connects EVL to the CAVEwave also connects to the TeraGrid Juniper T640 router located at StarLight. The TeraGrid connects Chicago to Los Angeles to the San Diego Supercomputer Center at UCSD where, for this test, it was directly connected to the same OptIPuter cluster at Calit2. Since their physical fiber routes are not the same, the CAVEwave, going through Seattle, has an average round-trip-time (RTT) of 78.3ms, and the TeraGrid, a more direct path, has an average RTT of 56.2ms. 
 
MRTG (Multi Router Traffic Grapher) was used to monitor traffic through StarLight&rsquo;s Force10 switch, and a similar traffic utilization tool called Cricket was used to monitor traffic through the TeraGrid&rsquo;s Juniper T640 router at StarLight. To determine the maximum performance, researchers first used the iperf bandwidth measurement tool to send the same data using the unreliable UDP protocol. 

Using iperf, the maximum throughput achieved over the switched 10GE (10Gbps) CAVEwave network was 9.75Gbps, and the maximum throughput over the routed OC-192 (9.6Gbps) TeraGrid was 9.45Gbps. Using LambdaStream, CAVEwave achieved speeds of 9.23Gbps reliable memory-to-memory, 9.21Gbps reliable disk-to-memory, and 9.30Gbps reliable disk- to-disk transfers; and, TeraGrid achieved speeds of 9.16Gbps reliable memory-to-memory, 9.15Gbps reliable disk-to-memory, and 9.22Gbps reliable disk-to-disk transfers. Bidirectionally, CAVEwave achieved 18.19Gbps and TeraWave achieved 18.06Gbps doing reliable memory-to- memory transfers. 

The MRTG-measured bandwidth speeds were verified by LambdaStream, which is instrumented to monitor the amount of information it sends and receives. Moreover, whereas MRTG measurements are five-minute averages, LambdaStream measurements are continuous, and therefore more accurate. For several years now, EVL has been designing application-level protocols and instrumenting them for the user&rsquo;s awareness so scientists can have easy access to measurement of their own traffic. These protocols have been used over routed and switched networks but are particularly necessary when using Layer-1 optical switches, as bandwidth utilization cannot be measured any other way. 

It should be noted that these tests relied on the availability of TeraGrid routers with OC-192 ports, which are an order of magnitude more expensive than 10GE ports on switches, not an issue if the routers already are in place, as in this case, but important to note for future network implementations to serve high-performance data transfer. These tests were performed on transcontinental networks; EVL researchers believe that similar results would be achieved using hybrid transoceanic networks as well.

Sustained 10Gps LambdaStream experiments gets GRID Today Coverage

<a href="http://www.evl.uic.edu/core.php?mod=4&amp;type=1&amp;indi=284">LambdaStream</a> Application-level Transport Protocol Sustains Nearly 10Gbps Over Routed and Non-Routed Infrastructures 

As a number of large-scale, multinational experiments prepare to go online in the next 2-3 years, a new generation of data retrieval and transmission techniques and tools will be required. The data yielded by these experiments will be prolific, and a diverse, globally distributed community of scientists will be eager to acquire and explore this data. 

Computer scientists at the University of Illinois at Chicago&rsquo;s (UIC) Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) are working to give application scientists &ldquo;user-friendly&rdquo; options for transferring large datasets over wide-area networks; one such research effort focuses on the development of specialized application-level transport protocols. 

Today, most research and education networks are shared, and operate as &ldquo;best effort&rdquo;, with multiple routers, data paths and dynamic packet reassignment decisions that provide an equitable sharing among many users of bandwidth, but a less-than-optimal handling of cluster-computer-initiated data flows in the multi-hundred-megabit and multi-gigabit range. The current cost of routers makes it prohibitive to permanently optimize and dedicate a routed network infrastructure among specific sites that have large bursts of traffic, but are not utilizing the full bandwidth continuously. An alternative networking model, one which relies upon less costly switches, can be dedicated, and as such provide applications with known and knowable characteristics, such as guaranteed bandwidth (for data movement), guaranteed latency (for visualization, collaboration and data analysis) and guaranteed scheduling (for remote instruments). 

EVL is conducting application-level protocol research so applications can maximally exploit the available bandwidth, whether a network is routed, switched or both (hybrid). A &ldquo;fairness factor&rdquo; is being designed into this new generation of protocols to avoid forcing the data through and interfering with existing traffic. &ldquo;For the past five years, we have been designing specialized transport protocols for data-intensive interactive visualization and streaming media applications, where low latency and high reliability are of utmost importance,&rdquo; said EVL co-director <a href="http://www.evl.uic.edu/core.php?mod=4&amp;type=5&amp;indi=29">Jason Leigh</a>. 

This January, EVL researchers began testing whether data-intensive science can effectively use hybrid networks to move large files effectively using its specialized, application-level, UDP transport protocol called LambdaStream. 

EVL ran cluster-to-cluster file-transfer tests to determine whether the same network performance obtained over Layer-2 (switched) networks could be obtained with dedicated 10Gbps paths on Layer-3 (routed) networks using LambdaStream. The tests specifically compared throughput over a <a href="http://www.teragrid.org">TeraGrid</a> 10Gbps SONET-routed network using MultiProtocol Label Switching (MPLS) between Chicago and San Diego, and CAVEwave, a 10Gbps switched LAN PHY network between the same locations. 

The file-transfer programs invoked LambdaStream to send multiple 1Gbps data streams over each of these networks to saturate the 10Gbps links for 30-60 minute intervals. The dataset used was a 1-foot- resolution map of 5,000 square miles of the city of Chicago provided by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) National Center for Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS). The map consists of 3,000 files of tiled images that are 75MBytes each, for a total of 220GBytes of information. 

EVL performed three different LambdaStream tests over the TeraGrid and CAVEwave networks: moving data from memory to memory, from disk to memory, and from disk to disk; the three ways scientists typically use networks to access data. The measured performance across CAVEwave and TeraGrid was comparable, proving that a routed and non-routed infrastructure could both sustain near 10Gbps and behave the same when a specialized protocol is used. 

The January tests also affirmed that a switched, end-to-end dedicated wavelength is a reliable alternative to shared networks when transferring high-throughput scientific application data. 

As partners in the National Science Foundation&rsquo;s OptIPuter project, EVL and the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) are proving it is economical to have point-to-point connections once you have the right endpoint technologies in place. &ldquo;We are propagating a scalable, economical networking solution that puts high-performance networking resources into the control of individual scientists,&rdquo; said <a href="http://www.evl.uic.edu/core.php?mod=4&amp;type=5&amp;indi=10">Tom DeFanti</a>, EVL co-director and OptIPuter program co-PI. &ldquo;Lambda services offer scientists a networking means to solve problems that are cost prohibitive to do any other way.&rdquo; 

EVL is one of a few laboratories in the United States today that has access to its own persistent transcontinental 10GE optical connection, called the CAVEwave, on the National LambdaRail (NLR). CAVEwave extends from the StarLight optical Internet exchange in downtown Chicago, to the Pacific Northwest GigaPoP (PNWGP) in Seattle, to the UCSD campus. This link allows scientists at both ends to test experimental protocols and tools, and supports high-end networked application demonstrations. 

LAMBDASTREAM EXPERIMENT DETAILS 

A 30-node cluster at EVL connects to an in-house switch that aggregates traffic and sends it to a Force10 optical switch at StarLight. At UCSD, campus fibers connect the CAVEwave to a 28-node cluster in the Calit2 building. This configuration enables research among Chicago, San Diego, the University of Washington, and international colleagues who connect to the PNWGP via Pacific Wave on the U.S. west coast, or to StarLight in Chicago. 
 
The StarLight Force10 switch that connects EVL to the CAVEwave also connects to the TeraGrid Juniper T640 router located at StarLight. The TeraGrid connects Chicago to Los Angeles to the San Diego Supercomputer Center at UCSD where, for this test, it was directly connected to the same OptIPuter cluster at Calit2. Since their physical fiber routes are not the same, the CAVEwave, going through Seattle, has an average round-trip-time (RTT) of 78.3ms, and the TeraGrid, a more direct path, has an average RTT of 56.2ms. 
 
MRTG (Multi Router Traffic Grapher) was used to monitor traffic through StarLight&rsquo;s Force10 switch, and a similar traffic utilization tool called Cricket was used to monitor traffic through the TeraGrid&rsquo;s Juniper T640 router at StarLight. To determine the maximum performance, researchers first used the iperf bandwidth measurement tool to send the same data using the unreliable UDP protocol. 
 
Using iperf, the maximum throughput achieved over the switched 10GE (10Gbps) CAVEwave network was 9.75Gbps, and the maximum throughput over the routed OC-192 (9.6Gbps) TeraGrid was 9.45Gbps. Using LambdaStream, CAVEwave achieved speeds of 9.23Gbps reliable memory-to-memory, 9.21Gbps reliable disk-to-memory, and 9.30Gbps reliable disk-to-disk transfers; and, TeraGrid achieved speeds of 9.16Gbps reliable memory-to-memory, 9.15Gbps reliable disk-to-memory, and 9.22Gbps reliable disk-to-disk transfers. Bidirectionally, CAVEwave achieved 18.19Gbps and TeraWave achieved 18.06Gbps doing reliable memory-to-memory transfers. 
 
The MRTG-measured bandwidth speeds were verified by LambdaStream, which is instrumented to monitor the amount of information it sends and receives. Moreover, whereas MRTG measurements are five-minute averages, LambdaStream measurements are continuous, and therefore more accurate. For several years now, EVL has been designing application-level protocols and instrumenting them for the user&rsquo;s awareness so scientists can have easy access to measurement of their own traffic. These protocols have been used over routed and switched networks but are particularly necessary when using Layer-1 optical switches, as bandwidth utilization cannot be measured any other way. 
 
It should be noted that these tests relied on the availability of TeraGrid routers with OC-192 ports, which are an order of magnitude more expensive than 10GE ports on switches, not an issue if the routers already are in place, as in this case, but important to note for future network implementations to serve high-performance data transfer. These tests were performed on transcontinental networks; EVL researchers believe that similar results would be achieved using hybrid transoceanic networks as well. 

The HPC wire article can be read at: <a href="http://www.hpcwire.com/hpc/600190.html">www.hpcwire.com/hpc/600190.html</a>

LambdaStream gets HPC wired

EVL alumni and Argonne National Laboratory staff members, Mike Papka&rsquo;s and Joe Insley&rsquo;s research efforts and collaborative work in the development of arterial simulations / visualization are featured in &ldquo;Science Grid This Week&rdquo;. 

Grid Gets the Blood Flowing 

A collaboration of mathematicians, middleware developers and visualization scientists has demonstrated the most comprehensive three-dimensional model of human arterial blood flow ever attempted. The simulation of the human arterial tree, the network of arteries throughout the human body, was completed using TeraGrid resources. 

&ldquo;We want to be able to study diseases like atherosclerosis in more detail,&rdquo; said George Karniadakis from Brown University. &ldquo;What&rsquo;s the effect on the arteries in the brain if there&rsquo;s atherosclerosis, or plaque buildup, in the carotid artery? Individual arteries have been studied by many research groups, but they have to specify artificial conditions at the edges of each artery.&rdquo; With a global blood circulation model such guesses at conditions are not necessary, and scientists can see the effect of a disturbance in blood flow anywhere in the body. Such simulations may impact many areas of medical research. 

Over the past 10 years, Karniadakis and his research group developed a computer program that simulates the largest 55 arteries and 27 bifurcations, or places where an artery splits into two, in the tree. Until last year, the simulations were run on only one computing resource at a time, modeling at most two or three branching sites at once. But in early 2005, the collaboration proposed harnessing the combined power of the TeraGrid&rsquo;s many computing resources to simulate, and visualize in real time, more than a dozen branching sites? 

More <a href="http://www.interactions.org/sgtw/2006/0329/arterial_tree_more.html">www.interactions.org/sgtw/2006/0329/arterial_tree_more.html</a>

Three-Dimensional Bifurcations

Science Grid This Week Features EVL Alumni Research

&ldquo;Futuristic Optical System Tackles Image Processing&rdquo; 
Reprinted from NetworkWorld.com, 06/15/06 

See <a href="http://www.cio.in/news/viewArticle/ARTICLEID=1607">www.cio.in/news/viewArticle/ARTICLEID=1607</a> to read the article.

LambdaVision Display at UIC/EVL

OptIPuter Research Featured in CIO India

EVL Ph.D. student Yu-Chung Chen will present EVL&rsquo;s Corelyzer project during a poster session at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC 2006) in San Francisco, California, August 7-11. 

In October 2006, Corelyzer will be deployed at the ANDRILL project&rsquo;s McMurdo expedition station. ANDRILL is the newest geological drilling program to recover stratigraphic records from the Antarctic region. 

Corelyzer is being developed by the University of Illinois at Chicago&rsquo;s Electronic Visualization Laboratory with funding provided by the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Corelyzer Project Presented at WWDC 2006 Poster Session

Chicago - A memorandum of understanding between the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) and Japan&rsquo;s National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) will be signed to formalize a collaboration that puts Chicago at the hub of ultra-high-speed advanced optical network research and development exchanges with Japanese research and education institutions. 

The Japanese Advanced Testbed Network for Research and Development, known as JGN-II, links Tokyo with Chicago via StarLight, a National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded advanced Internet switching facility located at Northwestern University&rsquo;s downtown Chicago campus and managed by UIC and Northwestern. 

Japan&rsquo;s choice of Chicago&rsquo;s StarLight underscores confidence in both the technology and research being conducted at UIC to develop new application tools and techniques that enable, for example, real-time transmission of super-high-resolution images (four times the quality of current HDTV) and computer simulations over long-distance optical networks. 

Researchers from UIC&rsquo;s Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL), will be available to describe likely applications for this technology. 

The signing will take place Wednesday, July 26, in UIC&rsquo;s University Hall.

Chicago-Japan High-Speed Data Link

&ldquo;Science Grid This Week&rdquo; features the iCluster visualization system developed at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego (UCSD) which uses EVL&rsquo;s software - Scalable Adaptive Graphics Environment, or SAGE, designed for the NSF-funded OptIPuter project. SAGE is the underpinnings for the collaborative scientific visualization system, providing the functionality to share high-resolution imagery as well as high-definition video among groups of collaborators at local or remote sites. 

The network-centered architecture of SAGE allows collaborators to simultaneously run various applications (such as 3D rendering, remote desktop, video streams and 2D maps) on local or remote clusters, and share them by streaming the pixels of each application over ultra-high-speed networks to large tiled displays. 

The Scripps &lsquo;iCluster&rsquo; is a visualization system that offers a resolution of up to 50 million pixels for the exploration of Earth sciences datasets. The iCluster consists of 12 30&rdquo; Apple Cinema displays arranged in a three by four grid and powered by a cluster of 7 Apple PowerMac G5 machines. The system is used to monitor real-time streams of data collected by seismic, coastal and environmental sensor networks.

SAGE / OptIPuter in &ldquo;Science Grid This Week&rdquo;

On behalf of the Peoria Civic Federation, Peoria NEXT, and the ArtsPartners of Central Illinois, &ldquo;Interplay: Loose Minds in a Box&rdquo; has been chosen as one of the Distinguished Semifinalists for the 2006 Peoria Prize for Creativity. 

The honor of being a Semifinalist for the Peoria Prize is made all the more so by the high quality and creativity of the many projects from throughout the country submitted this year by teams of world-class collaborators. A panel of seven anonymous judges from all walks of the creative class - artists, scientists, educators, entrepreneurs, and government leaders - picked the ten Semifinalists that included &ldquo;Loose Minds in a Box&rdquo;, which embodied the spirit of creative collaboration that is the Peoria Prize.

Loose Minds in a Box video still from the main mix

Loose Minds in a Box - Peoria Prize Semifinalists!

Distinguished Professor of Computer Science and EVL co-director Tom DeFanti is being honored with an Outstanding Research Achievement award by UIC&rsquo;s College of Engineering during its 2006 Outstanding Alumni, Faculty, and Staff Awards ceremony. The awards ceremony will be held November 2nd at the National Italian American Sports Hall of Fame in Chicago. Dr. DeFanti is unable to attend due to travel conflicts.

DeFanti Recognized with Outstanding Research Achievement Award

University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) director Jason Leigh formally welcomed Kyoto University to the Global Lambda Visualization Facility (GLVF) community of high-performance networking and visualization researchers during his presentation on Friday, October 27, 2006, at the JGN 2 Workshop #8 in Iwate, Japan. Japan&rsquo;s National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) and Iwate Prefecture University sponsored the workshop. 

Leigh&rsquo;s presentation, &ldquo;The SAGE System over JGN 2 and StarLight&rdquo;, given via two-way teleconferencing between Chicago and Kyoto, and then multicast to Iwate and several other locations throughout Japan, focused on how Kyoto University will work with EVL and other GLVF participants on scientific visualization and collaboration technology development using the Japanese Advanced Testbed Network for Research and Development, or the JGN 2 network, including an international component from Tokyo to Chicago&rsquo;s StarLight. 

Leigh is the primary organizer of the GLVF, a group of computer-graphics experts, social scientists, and network engineers from approximately 20 institutions worldwide who work on complementary distributed visualization and collaboration tools and technologies to benefit large-scale science. Prior to the iGrid 2005 Workshop last year, these experts self-organized to make their tools interoperable and to develop a common platform for advanced, real-time, interactive visualization and distance collaboration. 

GLVF sites are equipped with a wide range of visualization technologies and are connected to high-speed international networks that are part of a worldwide network fabric called the Global Lambda Integrated Facility (GLIF). One of the key collaboration technologies being used by the GLVF community is EVL&rsquo;s Scalable Adaptive Graphics Environment (SAGE). SAGE is specialized middleware that enables real- time streaming of extremely high-resolution graphics and high- definition (HD) video from remote HD cameras and distributed rendering and storage clusters to scalable display walls over high-speed networks. Kyoto University researchers already have SAGE installed on their tiled display and are developing SAGE-enabled high-definition-video-streaming and point-based rendering applications for 
the GLVF community. Kyoto University is connected to Japan&rsquo;s JGN 2 optical network testbed, which is funded by NICT, a participant in GLIF. 

Leigh is pleased to work with Kyoto researcher Kukimoto Nobuyuki, whom he has collaborated with for over 10 years. &ldquo;GLVF welcomes Kyoto University for its expertise and its desire to share technologies and best practices&rdquo;, said Leigh. &ldquo;GLVF is focused on the fusion of advanced digital technology into a unique end-to-end persistent infrastructure. Its participants have opportunities to work with computer scientists and domain scientists worldwide to harden, deploy and evaluate tools and techniques, tighten the feedback loop, integrate new ideas from many different cultures and backgrounds, and leverage international networking testbeds to create persistent environments. Everyone benefits.&rdquo; 

In August 2004, JGN 2 connected a 10Gbps transpacific link between Tokyo and StarLight, a National Science Foundation-funded advanced Internet switching facility located at Northwestern University&rsquo;s (NU) downtown Chicago campus and managed by UIC, NU and Argonne National Laboratory. Last July, NICT signed a memorandum of understanding with UIC, formalizing a collaboration with Japanese research and education organizations including universities and institutions, and recognizing Chicago as a major hub for ultra-high-speed advanced optical network research and development exchanges. 

<a href="http://www.evl.uic.edu/cavern/sage">About Scalable Adaptive Graphics Environment (SAGE)</a> 
The Scalable Adaptive Graphics Environment (SAGE) is an integrated system used to simultaneously display multiple networked applications on high-resolution tiled displays. The SAGE architecture uses distributed rendering clusters connected by high-bandwidth networks to stream multiple applications to a class of scalable tiled displays that are fast becoming a standard for scientific distance collaboration. Using SAGE, several applications - including high-resolution 2D imagery, 3D computer graphics and high definition video - can be streamed and viewed simultaneously. SAGE is being developed by the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago as part of the NSF-funded OptIPuter project. 

Related Links: 
<a href="http://www.evl.uic.edu">UIC Electronic Visualization Laboratory</a> 
<a href="http://www.kyoto-u.ac.jp/index-e.html">Kyoto University</a> 
<a href="http://www.evl.uic.edu/cavern/glvf">Global Lambda Visualization Facility</a> 
<a href="http://www.glif.is">Global Lambda Integrated Facility</a> 
<a href="http://www.startap.net/starlight">StarLight</a> 
<a href="http://www.jgn.nict.go.jp/">JGN 2</a>

Kyoto University Joins the Global Lambda Visualization Facility

EVL PhD graduate student researcher, Byungil Jeong presents &ldquo;High-Performance Dynamic Graphics Streaming for Scalable Adaptive Graphics Environment (SAGE)&rdquo; at the SC06 Grid Applications session chaired by Thilo Kielmann (Vrije Universiteit) November 15, 2006, 2:30pm. 

The Scalable Adaptive Graphics Environment (SAGE) is specialized middleware for enabling data, high-definition video and extremely high-resolution graphics to be streamed in real-time from remotely distributed rendering and storage clusters to scalable display walls over ultra-high-speed networks.

High-Performance Dynamic Graphics Streaming for Scalable Adaptive Graphics Environment

SAGE Research Presented at SC06

An Application-Centric Service To Create Virtual Laboratories for Global Collaboration 

Visualcasting is a new SAGE network service that enables two or more remote users to interact with one another, as well as with their data, at the same time. Users need to see one another and to see the same content to effectively work together over distance. The technology currently used to broadcast information to two or more sites is called multicast, and while effective, today&rsquo;s networking infrastructure does not automatically support it, and requires network engineering to implement. 

Visualcasting addresses this problem by enabling applications to select what information to send, and to whom to send it, without the need for technical support and network modifications. Moreover, visualcasting supports endpoint displays of variable size and configuration. Visualcasting is application-centric, enabling researchers to dynamically create their own virtual laboratories for global collaboration. 

At SC06, EVL showcases its SAGE visualcasting software. EVL creates a virtual laboratory with other SC06 research booths connected via 10Gbps links to SCinet, and with national (and international) sites via National LambdaRail. 

Each endpoint runs SAGE to send and/or receive real-time streams of ultra-high-resolution 2D and 3D content. Visualcasting manages the streams so the same content is made available to all participants. Visualcasting is supported by a bridging system that receives pixel streams from SAGE applications and replicates these streams to each endpoint. Visualcasting nodes are strategically placed in core network facilities and allocated to service distant collaborators. 

At SC06, EVL showcases its SAGE visualcasting software. EVL creates a virtual laboratory with other SC06 research booths connected via 10Gbps links to SCinet, and with national (and international) sites via National LambdaRail. 

For the demo, multiple collaborators share high-resolution content and participate via video conferencing. (Note: Not all groups are participating at the same time.) At the time of publication, participating groups include: 
<ul>
<li>Calit2 / CEOA - EVL is conducting SAGE Visualcasting demonstrations at this booth.</li>
<li>Dutch Research Consortium - SARA High Performance Networking &amp; Insight Services Group</li>
</ul> 

Content to be shown includes animations from NASA; simulations from Louisiana State University, UCSD Scripps Institution of Oceanography and UCSD National Center for Microscopy and Imaging Research; scientific visualizations from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications; and, climate data from SARA.

SAGE Visualcasting Demo at EVL

SAGE SC06 Visualcasting Demonstration

As an OptIPuter partner, EVL participated at this year&rsquo;s SC06 Conference showcasing SAGE, the Scalable Adaptive Graphics Environment advancements. SAGE is specialized middleware that simultaneously enables human-to-human communication and data-sharing communication on variable-sized tiled displays connected via optical networks. At SC06, SAGES&rsquo;s new network service - &lsquo;Visualcasting&rsquo; that enables two or more users to share application content in sending multi-gigabit streams as required was successfully demonstrated between OptIPuter partners on-site and via remote participation (Dutch Research Consortium / SARA High Performance Networking &amp; Insight Services Group; UIC / EVL and StarLight). 

SAGE demonstrations took place at the following SC06 exhibit booths: 
<ul>
<li>Apple Computer</li>
<li>California Institute of Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) and Center for Earth Observation Applications (CEOA) at University of California San Diego (UCSD)</li>
<li>Pacific Northwest GigaPoP and ResearchChannel (University of Michigan, School of Information)</li>
<li>Purdue University, Envision Center for Data Perceptualization and the Rosen Center for Advanced Computing</li>
</ul> 

PhD candidate Byungil Jeong&rsquo;s also presented a technical paper discussing SAGE research, &ldquo;High-Performance Dynamic Graphics Streaming for Scalable Adaptive Graphics Environment&rdquo;. EVL co-Director, Jason Leigh presented &ldquo;Global Lambda Visualization Facility and SAGE Visualcasting&rdquo;, and Associate Director, Maxine Brown presented &ldquo;TransLight and GLIF&rdquo;, both from the National LambdaRail SC06 booth on the show floor.

OptIPuter@SC06 Flyer

OptIPuter Exhibited at SC06

EVL Visiting Research Assistant Professor, Luc Renambot presented EVL&rsquo;s advanced visualiztion and networking research to colleagues and students of the PRIUS (Pacific Rim International University) Program, Osaka Japan. Invited by Osaka University and the PRIUS Program, Dr. Renambot&rsquo;s talk, &ldquo;Advanced Visualization and Collaboration Research over High-Speed Networks&rdquo; discussed EVL&rsquo;s vision for the creation of persistent internationally distributed collaboration facilities, including high-performance computing, advanced visualization, and one-of-kind instruments, to foster knowledge and discoveries for scientific advancement, and to engage students as they prepare for the global workforce. The foundations of these collaborative environments are among grid computing, optical networks (lambda grid), and high-resolution visualization. 

The PRIUS project, promoted by Osaka University, aims to foster human resources capable of taking leadership with international perspective and reinforce the Japanese international competitive power.

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