Byungil (Brent) Jeong’s PhD defense will be held on Friday, April 18th at 11:00am in the AG room (2068ERF) at EVL.

Byungil Jeong’s Thesis Demonstration is scheduled at 9am, prior to the defense presentation due to the time zone differences at participating sites.

The Thesis Demonstration is an international Visualcasting demonstration connecting Amsterdam, Michigan, KISTI / Korea, GIST / Korea and EVL’s main lab by multi-point HD video conferencing in the SAGE framework.

Abstract

The Scalable Adaptive Graphics Environment (SAGE) is a specialized middleware that enables real-time streaming of extremely high-resolution graphics and high-definition video from remotely distributed rendering and storage clusters to scalable display walls over ultra high-speed networks. This dissertation extends SAGE to support distant collaboration between multiple endpoints by distributing visualization to all participants.

In the SAGE framework, each visualization application streams its rendered pixels to the virtual high-resolution frame buffer of SAGE, allowing users to freely move, resize and overlap the application windows on the display. Every window movement or resize operation requires dynamic and non-trivial reconfigurations of the involved graphics streams. These reconfigurations become even more complex when SAGE is required to support multiple collaboration endpoints with different tiled display configurations and application window layouts.

Visualcasting is a new SAGE network service to address this problem using a high-speed bridging system that receives pixel streams from rendering clusters to duplicate and send them to each end-point. This enables distant collaboration among international researchers in scalable display environments. Using Visualcasting service, collaborators can share their visualization and interact each other through high-definition video conferencing in the SAGE Framework. This approach will be compared with the traditional router-based multicasting approaches.

Intellectual Merit

Visualcasting addresses the problem of high-performance graphics multicasting for tiled displays. Although a variety of techniques exist for supporting reliable multicasting, reliably multicasting graphics data onto remote tiled displays with heterogeneous display configurations is still an unsolved challenging problem. Furthermore, Visualcasting addresses the heterogeneity and scalability problems. Since each Visualcasting endpoint has heterogeneous network and display capacity, the Visualcasting service needs to adapt the graphics streams to the capacity of each endpoint to prevent it from being overloaded. Also, the Visualcasting service should be scalable in the number of endpoints and applications.

Broader Impact

Visualcasting enables SAGE to scalably multicast high-definition video and ultra-high resolution visualizations in real-time across globally distributed research centers. This capability will demonstrate a new way in which high-performance networking and visualization can be used in a broad range of research, academic and commercial applications. Furthermore, understanding the requirements, benefits and limits of Visualcasting and alternative approaches will provide valuable input into future Internet system design.