OptIPlanet Cyber-Mashup

September 1st, 2009 - August 31st, 2012

Categories: Multimedia, Networking, Software, Supercomputing, Tele-Immersion, User Groups, Visualization, VR

PIs Andy Johnson & Jason Leigh Using One of EVL’s OptiPortals
PIs Andy Johnson & Jason Leigh Using One of EVL’s OptiPortals

About

STCI: OptIPlanet Cyber-Mashup: Persistent Visualization and Collaboration Services for Global Cyber Infrastructure

The goal of this project is to accelerate the growth of a burgeoning community of international institutions that have adopted OptIPortals - ultra-resolution visualization display instruments interconnected by high-speed networks.

OptIPortals have been identified in recent DOE and NSF reports as a crucial cyberinfrastructure technology for facilitating large-scale data visualization and collaboration in science and engineering. This project will develop a collection of new community-requested capabilities for the Scalable Adaptive Graphics Environment (SAGE) - the fundamental software that drives OptIPortals. Furthermore this project will establish a persistent and expandable collaboration service to facilitate distance collaborations between organizations that have adopted OptIPortals.

Transformative Intellectual Merit
Coping with complexity and scale in data is a problem that spans all of e-science. The Internet now provides unprecedented access to data, and that will continue to grow exponentially. NSF’s many cyberinfrastructure initiatives are amassing terabytes to petabytes of data, and will soon reach exabytes.

Over the past five years, we have witnessed a trend toward the use of ultra-resolution displays and environments as “lenses” for observing data amassed in these cyberinfrastructure repositories. To the scientists that have built them, these displays are their new “microscopes” and “telescopes”. Our work in OptIPortals and SAGE enables scientific users to connect visualization pipelines running on supercomputers, data storage systems and/or instruments (e.g., high-definition cameras) to form a giant Cyber-Mashup on these ultra-high-resolution environments. Cyber-Mashups created on OptIPortals are a future-thinking, transformative approach to making large-scale data visualization, exploration and collaboration more scalable, and therefore affordable, for scientists and engineers to use NSF cyberinfrastructure.

Transformative Broader Impact
SAGE and OptIPortals are transformative technologies that demonstrate the United States’ leadership in cyberinfrastructure research. Already over 40 top institutions around the world ranging from national laboratories and universities to private industry have invested millions of dollars to install OptIPortals and high speed networking to enable them to become part of the OptIPlanet Collaboratory.

The first adopters of OptIPortals have used them in disciplines such as: geoscience, homeland security, bioscience, cosmology, atmospheric science, chemistry, computer science, medical education and art. We anticipate that the robust and persistent technologies that will be developed and deployed in this project will enable this technology to reach out to an even larger community of scientists and students, and transform the way they make discoveries using large-scale data using cyberinfrastructure.