1998 research paper wins an award!

February 25th, 2012

Categories: Applications, Industrial VR, Industry, Networking, Software, Supercomputing, Tele-Immersion, User Groups, Visualization, VR

TIDE application in the CAVE, with Jason Leigh and Andy Johnson
TIDE application in the CAVE, with Jason Leigh and Andy Johnson

About

February 25, 2012

Jason Leigh and Andy Johnson of the UIC Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) recently learned that a paper they helped co-author 14 years ago has been selected as one of the top 20 papers by the International ACM Symposium on High Performance Distributed Computing (HPDC).

HPDC, now in its 21st year, is working with Omni-Press to publish a special proceedings that features the top 20 papers from the past 20 years of HPDC publications. The 1998 paper “Application Experiences with the Globus Toolkit” is one of them. The papers for this special proceedings were nominated by the HPDC community-at-large and then selected by a committee.

The paper features several applications that used Globus Toolkit, middleware that simplifies the use of “computational grids”. EVL’s CAVERNsoft was one of them, utilizing Nexus, the communication component of the Globus Toolkit. CAVERNsoft, or CAVE Research Network software, simplified collaborative virtual-reality sessions, enabling geographically distributed users to define, update and access shared virtual worlds.

By the late 90s, CAVERNsoft had a strong user community that connected remote CAVE™ and ImmersaDesk™ virtual environments for collaborative problem-solving. The article highlights a few CAVERNsoft applications, notably: it was the underlying data distribution architecture for VisualEyes, a collaborative design review system used by General Motors; CAVE5D, a collaborative system for visualizing multi-dimensional weather and environmental hydrology data; Virtual Temporal Bone, a collaborative learning environment to teach medical students the structure and function of the inner ear; and TIDE (Teleimmersive Data-mining Environment), a collaborative system for viewing decision-trees generated by data-mining classifiers (see image below).

CAVERNsoft was a unique collaboration framework for its time. EVL continues to develop advanced display technologies and the collaboration software necessary to make them useful and usable, particularly with today’s SAGE (Scalable Adaptive Graphics Environment) middleware.

EVL appreciates that HPDC selected this paper as one of its best papers for the past 20 years. A copy of the paper is available via the download link on the right (related document).

Reference
S. Brunett, K. Czajkowski, S. Fitzgerald, I. Foster, A. Johnson, C. Kesselman, J. Leigh, S. Tuecke, “Application experiences with the Globus toolkit,” Proceedings of the 7th International Symposium on High Performance Distributed Computing (HPDC), 1998, pp 81-88, dx.doi.org/10.1109/HPDC.1998.709959

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