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Information Technology:
The 21st Century Revolution
IT R&D
Highlights -- ACCESS to the Access Grid |
 
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Overview
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In April 1999, the NSF-funded National Computational Science Alliance
(Alliance) opened a state-of-the-art communication facility in the Washington,
D.C., metropolitan area to house the Alliance Center for Collaboration,
Education, Science and Software (ACCESS DC). The first in a series of
such sites being developed by the Alliance around the country, the 7,000-square-foot
ACCESS DC complex--located adjacent to NSF headquarters in Arlington,
Virginia-offers the business, education, and government communities hands-on
introductory experience with the high end technologies and applications
generated by Alliance IT R&D. ACCESS DC is designed to serve as a comprehensive
information technology transfer point, where representatives of these
major sectors, guided by skilled researchers, can examine, discuss, and
experiment with the Nation's most advanced networking capabilities. The
goal is to expand public understanding of how technology can strengthen
business competitiveness, education, and government services, and improve
the quality of life in the new century.
The Alliance, one of the two grant winners in NSF's PACI program, is a
collaboration of more than 50 research institutions, industry, and Government
formed in 1997 to prototype a next generation computational and information
infrastructure linking supercomputers, advanced visualization environments,
remote scientific and medical instrumentation, and very large databases
through high-speed networks such as vBNS and Abilene. The Alliance structure
includes:
- Six application technologies
teams-chemical engineering, cosmology, environmental hydrology, molecular
biology, nanomaterials, and scientific instrumentation
- Three enabling technologies
teams-parallel computing, distributed computing, and data and collaboration
- Four education, outreach, and
training teams-enhancing education, universal access, government, and
training
- Fifteen partners for advanced
computational services-these are the research institutions that provide
gateways to the National Alliance Grid, the Alliance's infrastructure
for advanced computing
- Fifteen industrial partnerships,
10 strategic vendors, and Federal partnerships with DoD's High Performance
Computing Modernization Program (HPCMP) and DOE's ASCI
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The Computionational
Grid
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The National Alliance Grid encompasses two components. The Computational
Grid consists of a core group of high end parallel computing systems called
supernodes, located at the Alliance headquarters at NCSA and at Boston University,
the Ohio Supercomputing Center, the University of Kentucky, the University
of New Mexico/Maui High Performance Computing Center, and the University
of Wisconsin-Madison. The structure of the Computational Grid, which encompasses
a variety of parallel processor architectures (massively parallel, parallel
vector, distributed shared memory, shared memory symmetric multiprocessors,
and clustered workstations), enables Alliance investigators to evaluate
the relative performance of applications running on these architectures,
and provides testbeds for researchers developing portable programming languages
and environments.
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The Access Grid
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The Access Grid is the ensemble of resources, including hardware, software,
and communications capabilities, enabling people across the Grid to collaborate
in large-scale distributed meetings, collaborative teamwork sessions, seminars,
lectures, tutorials, and training. Access Grid nodes are "designed spaces"
that support the high end audio and visual technology-large-format media
displays, presentation and interactive software environments, and interfaces
to Grid middleware and remote visualization environments-needed to provide
high-quality and productive user experiences. As the first fully equipped
prototype location for such group-to-group, as opposed to desktop-to-desktop,
interactivity, ACCESS DC is a primary host site for the Access Grid and
demonstrates the Grid's collaboration and large-scale research capabilities.
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Research activities
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Access Grid research will explore:
- Scheduling mechanisms and
models for group collaboration, such as tools to script and synchronize
activities across the network
- Network audio, focusing on ways
to improve the quality-of-service engineering needed for high-resolution
audio streams to and from Grid nodes
- Scalable, high-resolution video
techniques, including compression, panning and zooming capabilities,
and video mosaics
- Designs for a network flow engine
(NFE) and extensible routing technologies and tools to enable researchers
to prioritize and route video and audio streams dynamically across the
Grid
- Integration of remote visualization
capabilities, including tools enabling interoperability and synchronization
between differing visualization systems, and elaboration of the prototype
Flatland 3-D collaborative visualization system
- Human factors and related workspace
design and function issues, including physical and psychological responses
to visualization environments and quantitative comparisons of total
immersion and projection display technologies
- Remote 2-D and 3-D tools and
applications
- Integration and coordination
of the Access Grid, including discussions with industrial partners about
commercial packaging of Grid node hardware to facilitate broader adoption
of a standard hardware configuration
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Access Grid nodes |
Other Access Grid nodes are currently operational or under construction
at the Air Force Research Laboratory, ANL, Boston University, the University
of Illinois at Chicago's EVL, the University of Hawaii, the University
of Kansas, the University of Kentucky, LBNL, LANL, the Maui High Performance
Computing Center, NCAR, NCSA/UIUC, the University of New Mexico, North
Dakota State, Ohio State, Princeton University, and the University of
Utah. The Alliance will leverage the experience of the ACCESS DC site
to guide expansion of the Access Grid utility to PACI partners and institutions
in NSF's Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR),
the Southeastern Universities Research Association (SURA), and IT R&D
partnerships. The infrastructure at each site will vary with local priorities
and programmatic needs, and some of the interactive sites will be independent
of the Access Grid.
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ACCESS DC |
To bring visitors directly in contact with high end IT capabilities, such
as visual supercomputing to create 3-D virtual environments, ACCESS DC is
equipped with the latest immersive virtual reality, teleconferencing, and
workstation technologies, all powered by cutting-edge software for interacting
with distributed data and collaborating with colleagues in different locations.
Supported by teams of experts, both on site and distributed across the Alliance,
ACCESS DC visitors use the Grid and its applications to work in collaborative
immersive realities, conduct multilocation video and multimedia conferences,
and experiment with distributed distance learning capabilities.
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Visitors and workshops
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Since its inaugural open house, ACCESS DC has averaged nearly 200 visitors
a month including representatives of K-12 and higher education, Federal,
state, and local government agencies, and Alliance member institutions,
and international visitors and dignitaries. Education and training activities
have included:
- A workshop on parallel computing,
hosted by NCSA
- A course and a workshop on
Java for scientific programming with Tango, Syracuse University's software
for Web-based distributed collaboration
- A distributed computing workshop
hosted by NCSA and the National Laboratory for Applied Networking Research
(NLANR)
- An ARL/NCSA/Maryland Virtual High School summer workshop on computational
science for high school teachers and students, a week-long program providing
hands-on experience with state-of-the-art computational tools for problem
solving in science and engineering
- An SC99 supercomputing conference demonstration linking ACCESS DC
with EVL and the NCSA exhibition booth over NSF's very high performance
Backbone Network Services (vBNS) network
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ACCESS DC, located
near NSF in Arlington, Virginia, is equipped with the latest immersive virtual
reality, teleconferencing, and worksttion etcnologies, powered by cuttingedge
software. At the upper left is ACCESS DC's ImmersaDesk. The ACCESS DC multiscreen
interactive conference facility is pictured abouve. And ACCESS DC's state-of-the-art
meeting room is pictured left. |
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Chautauquas '99 |
ACCESS DC participated in the Alliance's first major Access Grid event,
called Chautauquas 99, which was designed to showcase for audiences of
nonspecialis ts the Grid's varied uses in distance learning, distributed
collaboration, and remote visualization. Three Access Grid nodes--Boston
University, the University of Kentucky, and the University of New Mexico--each
hosted a two-day Chautauqua in late summer 1999 open to interested members
of the university and regional communities. About 500 people attended
the three sessions, both on site and at multicast remote locations.
ACCESS DC hosted meetings of NSF's
Digital Government Consortium, a nationwide network of researchers from
academia, industry, and government working to improve access to government
information and services through IT R&D, and of the Collaborative Community
of Nations/Smithsonian National American Indian Museum. ACCESS DC is collaborating
with DARPA and the ISI East network engineering firm to host the NGI Distinguished
Lecture Series at the Northern Virginia facility.
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Chautauquas 2000 |
In summer 2000, ACCESS DC will host two Chautauquas 2000. The first, sponsored
by the Ohio Supercomputing Center and the Committee on Institutional Cooperation,
a partnership of 12 midwestern research universities, will be held June
13-15, 2000, with the supercomputing center serving as co-host site. The
second is scheduled for August 1-3, 2000, under the sponsorship of the University
of Kansas and NSF's EPSCoR K*Star research program. The university will
serve as co-host site for this event.
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