Networked Computing for the 21st Century Collaboratories

	Collaboratories and collaborative technologies Multi-media Architecture that Scales across Heterogeneous environments (MASH) Materials Microcharacterization Collaboratory CORE 2000 NIST's Manufacturing Collaboratory
Collaboratories and collaborative technologies	In the future, science and education will operate in a highly distributed but fully connected environment where every element is aware of and can interact with all other elements. Research teams will be able to work together effectively regardless of geographic and temporal separation among the individual members. This collaboratory approach will allow researchers to conduct large scale modeling and simulation, quickly access appropriate information, share access to and remotely operate scarce and expensive facilities and instruments, and work within virtual environments to better visualize scientific data and configure and control experiments.   Achieving tomorrow's vision requires research efforts today, including R&D in advanced technologies for collaborative environments. In programs such as DARPA's Intelligent Collaboration and Visualization program and the Department of Energy's DOE 2000 initiative for national collaboratories, Federal agencies are cooperating to develop new collaborative technologies and prototype tools and to apply and evaluate those prototypes. In FY 1998, tools developed by integrating research from networking, software engineering, and distributed systems will become available to Government and commercial entities and will be deployed in several scientific collaboratories operated by DOE.
Multi-media Architecture that Scales across Heterogeneous environments (MASH)	MASH is an object-oriented framework for scalable, multimedia collaboration being developed at the University of California, Berkeley. MASH will enable developers of collaborative applications to manage data type heterogeneity, coordinate distributed resources in collaborative sessions, archive and retrieve the contents of multimedia collaborative sessions, and compose new collaborative applications from a toolkit of components. It is being validated in a collaboratory testbed focused on distance learning across the Internet.   MASH will provide next-generation Internet multimedia conferencing tools, replacing the MBONE (multicast backbone) videoconferencing tools developed at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. MASH integrates the real-time image and video "transcoding proxies" developed for DARPA's global mobile information systems program. These proxies adapt image representations and video streams across bandwidth-constrained wireless communications links. In MASH, the transcoding proxies, coupled with a consensus-based resource allocation protocol, enable fixed-session bandwidth to be allocated automatically among collaborators by monitoring the level of interest the group has in data streams flowing during a session.     As shown here in a distance learning application, MASH enables collaboration among groups in multimedia rooms with large screen displays and individuals at remote sites, connected via various wired and wireless bandwidths, who access the collaboration using desktop, notebook, or handheld devices.
Materials Microcharacterization Collaboratory	Scientific research teams, working in pilot collaboratories, are providing validation and feedback that will guide the design of these and other tools intended to provide shared collaborative access to unique computational and experimental resources. The teams and pilot collaboratories will also demonstrate how advanced collaboration technology can affect the conduct of science. The Materials MicroCharacterization Collaboratory (MMC -- demonstrated at the Netamorphosis NGI exhibit) brings together five facilities in an interactive electronic laboratory. Participants include Argonne, Lawrence Berkeley, and Oak Ridge National Laboratories, NIST, and the University of Illinois. These facilities bring together virtually every characterization technique that employs electrons, ions, photons, x-rays, neutrons, mechanical and/or electromagnetic radiation to elucidate the microstructure of any material. Through the MMC, distributed teams can use and share these complementary facilities. One early problem uncovered by the MMC was that latency, introduced by remote access across networks, leads to difficulty in controlling delicate instruments. To deal with this problem, the concept of visual servoing was developed. It hides network latency and simplifies the use of scientific imaging instruments.     From a live MMC multisite session between collaboratory members operating a state-of-the-art field emission scanning electron microscope at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
CORE 2000	Problems in scheduling and managing distributed resources during real-time collaborative sessions are being addressed through CORE2000, a real-time collaboration engine being developed at DOE's Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory (EMSL) to handle membership, authentication, event distribution, and invocation. The CORE2000 interface specification allows incompatible collaboration tools to be integrated. The CORE2000 session manager provides users with integrated access to tools such as Habanero, a framework developed by NCSA for sharing Java objects. CORE2000 will operate on a variety of platforms and will provide an application programming interface (API) for on-line instruments and collaborative applications such as DOE's WindTunnel and NLM's Visible Human project.     CORE2000, illustrated in this composite, will provide an application programming interface for on-line instruments and collaborative applications.
NIST's Manufacturing Collaboratory	A manufacturing collaboratory is being deployed by NIST, the University of Michigan, and industrial participants. This effort will provide a technology environment to implement and assess the effects of distributed integrated manufacturing.