Intensive Collaboration Environments

1. Intensive Collaboration Environments Jason Leigh

2. Motivation • Science, Engineering, Education and Art are increasingly a collaborative affair. • Extreme bandwidth networks & low cost commodity computing is redefining the capabilities of collaborative work- you can do more than just talk to each other over the networks. • How do we provide human interfaces to the LambdaGrid? • How do we help humans collaborate with each other and with the LambdaGrid? • What kind of technology is needed?

3. A focal point of EVL’s collaboration research is motivated by the Maximally Co-Located Project Room or War Room • Olson & Olson – Michigan • Study of 9 project rooms – software design, appliance design, organization design, sales response team • Reported initial fear that co-located work may be distracting. Disadvantages of co-location was easily overcome by the benefits • Comparison of war room groups with norm showed performance of war room group well above corporate average (doubling for software design case)

4. Maximally Co-Located Think Rooms, Project Rooms, War Rooms • Their time was not shared with other projects • Fluidity of subgroup formation was rated very important • Flip charts were persistent configurable records of their past meeting results. Charts could be moved anywhere • Spatiality was important. Relationship of participants with artifacts in the space. Deictic references to them. • Digital white boards saved time • Small nearby cubicles to provide quiet but maintain accessibility to others Welcome to EVL

5. The Continuum Plasma Touch screen for annotations Camera array Passive stereo Immersive Display Wireless tablets, PDAs, laptops Tiled display (LCD tiles for high resolution, or plasma screens)

6. The Continuum at EVL Challenge is to develop software to seamlessly integrate these technologies to allow effortless use.

7. Components of the Continuum • Video Conferencing • Immersion • Large Scale Data Visualization and Distribution • Annotation • Wireless Interaction • Concept is to provide a collection of mix and matchable modules to support a variety of collaboration “styles”

8. speakers happy nodeoperator cameras desktop ambient mics Video Conferencing: The AccessGrid

9. Immersion : The AGAVE Access Grid Augmented Virtual Environment Originally designed & developed by EVL in 2001 Now widespread adoption by GeoWall Consortium for Research & education in the Geosciences (www.geowall.org)

10. 70 Walls since Jan 2001 June ‘02 Sept. ‘02 70 40

11. The GeoWall Consortium • Provides open source software and data sets for Windows, Linux, Mac OS, to Geoscience researchers and educators. • Integration into Univ. Michigan, Minnesota and Arizona State curriculum- ~3000 students per year • Deployment at SciTech Museum in Aurora, Illinois • Adoption by Earthscope Education and Outreach program

12. Collaborative Annotation :The Plasma Touch Screen Matisse Smartboard over Plasma screen as the persistent flip-chart

13. Large Scale Data Visualization and Distribution : TeraScope • Goal is to develop information browsing interfaces that make manipulating, visualizing and interpreting massive data sets as easy as operating a spreadsheet- a Terabyte spreadsheet! • Provide the illusion that you are clicking on a terabyte data file. • Visualization consists of visual summaries/precis of data sets highlighting correlations and detailed visualizations of sub-regions • Visualization hardware should be a tiled display where a number of visualizations can be shown simultaneously for inspection- this is in contrast to the traditional use of tiled displays for 1 big picture

14. TeraScope Large Dataspace data store • 100M/s – 24 hours to access 1 Terabyte of data • 500M/s – 4.8 hours using a single PC • 10G/s – 14.4 minutes using 20 node PC cluster GigEs (long distance,high latency) GRIDRAM(Network Memory cache) Local & metro area GigEs Parallel Datamining &visualization

15. Large Data Visualization and Distribution : TeraVision VGA / DVI capture GigE RemoteDisplay • Raw image capture (1024x768 30fps) • 500Mbps uncompressed stream • Software independent

16. Gang TeraVision boxes to stream a CAVE or a tiled display Grid Computing / Data Resource multicast High resolution parallel rendering on high performance Visualization cluster

17. Wireless Interaction • Allow users to drag & drop documents from their laptops & PDAs into the Continuum for viewing by participants. • Then steer the manipulation of the document by remote control of Continuum displays.

18. Grid Systems Needed to Support the Continuum • Persistent server to maintain the state of the long term collaboration & data artifacts generated during the course of a collaboration (currently does not exist as part of the Grid architecture) • Artifacts may include: results of prior simulations; parameters for simulations or queries to databases that are to be initiated during the course of a collaboration. • Apriori and realtime resource scheduling of high bandwidth networking, computing, and storage. Realtime is needed for emergency meetings. • Authorization, authentication, accounting, anti-DOS, for security of collaborations.

19. Closing Remarks • The Grid is great for computing resources to talk to each other. • It is vitally important to make working on the Grid and LambdaGrid as easy as working with a document on your laptop. • Currently the only Grid system for humans to interact with the Grid is the AccessGrid- which is primarily for human to human discourse. • Intensive Collaboration Environments are intended to support a collaboration between humans and the LambdaGrid.

20. Thank You • For more information: • www.evl.uic.edu/cavern/teranode • www.geowall.org • Quanta: www.evl.uic.edu/cavern/quanta • This work is supported in part by: • The National Science Foundation • The Office of Naval Research • Microsoft Corporation