News Releases

Canadians Blaze New Media Trail in Architectural Design at iGrid 2005

Ottawa’s Carleton Immersive Media Studio (CIMS) to showcase commercial potential of world’s fastest global computer network

Ottawa, Canada and San Diego, CA, September 23, 2005 - Faster than a bolt of lightning. More powerful than anything Bill Gates has put together. Able to leap a continent in a split second the dawn of a new era in architecture is taking flight.

Two teams of Carleton University students, thousands of kilometers apart, will be linked Monday via computer network lightpathsin a unique demonstration of the future of digital design in architecture as part of the global iGrid 2005 showcase. The students from the Carleton Immersive Media Studio (CIMS) have been selected for an opening night presentation at iGrid 2005, one of the largest aggregations of computing and data transmission bandwidth ever assembled for research. One of roughly 50 demonstrations over the event’s three days, the CIMS demonstration will showcase the commercial potential of architecture and high performance Grid computing.

Led by Professor Michael Jemtrud, Director of CIMS, the nine students will work simultaneously on a highly detailed, complex three-dimensional digital replica of the famous Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, near San Diego, established by Dr. Jonas Salk, the creator of the polio vaccine. Now, 40 years later, the Salk Institute is the leading U.S. research base for vaccines against bioterrorism.

What we are doing today signals a paradigm shift in the world of architectural design and CIMS is leading the way,said Jemtrud, who accompanied the student design team in San Diego. We are showing that the technology now exists to quickly link architects, designers, engineers and construction teams together in a seamless real-time digital work environment for flawless execution in a fraction of the time of traditional processes.

One team will be at the CIMS lab at Carleton University and the other will be at the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) at the University of California, San Diego. A high-definition video link will connect the two teams to enable real-time, face-to-face collaboration.

This demonstration shows how the most creative minds can come together anywhere in the world to imagine and construct together in rich, digitally enabled collaborative work environments,said Jemtrud. The complex digital re-construction will include precise and accurate details and design features in a 3-D model which will have a highly-rendered and sophisticated quality to it.

CIMS is using CA*Net 4, Canadas high-speed national research and education network established by Ottawas CANARIE Inc., linked to other high speed research networks as part of the Global Lambda Integrated Facility (GLIF) a international virtual high speed computer research network. The massive quantities of data for the CIMS students designs will travel on User Controlled LightPaths (UCLP) or fibre-optic linked networks at speeds of 1 gigabit per second (Gbps). That is the equivalent of transmitting all the music on 1.5 compact discs in a second, an entire DVD movie in about four seconds, or 20,000 web pages in one second.

It is exciting to see CA*net 4 transforming not only what people do but how they do it,said Andrew Bjerring, President and CEO of Ottawa-based CANARIE. CIMS is demonstrating the practical utility of lightpath capabilities and the power of the network to allow them to create new collaborations and achieve innovative results.

Whether used by scientific collaborators, Hollywood or teams of architects thousands of miles apart, there is a need for quality and security guarantees for high-resolution and super-high-resolution streaming media, said Maxine Brown, Co-chair of iGrid 2005. CIMS is showcasing the value-added that 10 to 20Gb of persistent connectivity can bring to the design and engineering of structures, just as it does for interactive conferencing, remote scientific observation, long-distance educational mentoring, or distributed media production.

In addition to CANARIE, the CIMS demonstration involves the support of a number of partners including the Communications Research Centre (CRC), the National Research Council (NRC), and corporate partners such as IBM , Cisco Canada and Alias Wavefront.

The live event will take place at the CIMS lab at Carleton University at 11p.m. on Monday September 26, 2005. The CIMS lab is located in room 448 of the Azrieli Pavilion at Carleton University.

About CIMS
The Carleton Immersive Media Studio (CIMS) explores the creation of virtual and built environments, and investigates their capacity to transform and to be transformed by our perceptual and epistemological foundations. Using new media technologies, CIMS produces digital cultural content that enhances the development and application of new technologies in a variety of cultural fields. Funded through public and private sector partnerships, this applied and theoretical research supports a jointly creative and critical mandate, with the objective of expanding these research capabilities to foster global institutional competitiveness.

The CIMS research agenda encompasses the development of new technologies and expertise in three-dimensional real-time visualization and simulation for output to advanced rich-media visualization, immersive environments, high-fidelity display, and the Web. By producing content specific to research in architecture, urban design, heritage preservation, and related disciplines, CIMS uses cultural content-based research to drive innovations and to complement traditional research and development methods in the relevant fields. For more information: www.cims.carleton.ca.

About CANARIE Inc.
CANARIE is Canadas advanced Internet organization, a not-for-profit corporation funded by Industry Canada to facilitate the development and use of next-generation research networks and the applications and services that run on them. CANARIE promotes collaboration among key sectors and partners with innovators around the world, and in so doing stimulates innovation and growth and helps to deliver social, cultural, and economic benefits to all Canadians. For more information, visit www.canarie.ca.

About iGrid 2005
The International Grid (iGrid) collaborative event showcases ongoing global collaborations in middleware development and applications research that require high-performance multi-gigabit networks. The iGrids are organized every two or three years by institutions, organizations, consortia and National Research & Education Networks who also participate in the Global Lambda Integrated Facility (GLIF). Overall planning responsibilities for iGrid 2005 are being handled by the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) at the University of California, San Diego, in cooperation with the Mathematics and Computer Science Division of Argonne National Laboratory, SURFnet, University of Amsterdam, and CANARIE. For more information, see www.igrid2005.org.

For more information, or to arrange interviews, please contact:
Kevin MacNeill
CIMS Lab
(613) 277-1384
Kevin @ cims.carleton.ca

Mats Lindeberg
CANARIE
Manager, Communications
613-43-5377
mats.lindeberg @ canarie.ca

Bluesky Strategy Group (For CIMS)
Stuart McCarthy
613-241-3512 x 229
stuart @ blueskystrategygroup.com
or
Susan Smith
713-241-3512 x 221
susan @ blueskystrategygroup.com

Doug Ramsey
iGrid 2005
858-822-5825
dramsey @ ucsd.edu




BACKGROUNDER
CIMS Demonstration of UCLP X GRID Application at iGrid 2005
In the effort to showcase Canadian built lightpath technologies, CIMS will be presenting research done as part of the Virtual Design Studio at iGrid 2005 in San Diego, California. The demonstration will be part of the opening night activities at the event which runs from September 26 29, 2005.

The CIMS demonstration will feature the 3D digitization of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California. The collaborative process by which the Salk Institute, a well-documented and much-respected work of architecture by Louis Kahn, was digitized incorporates variable and heterogeneous digital assets which will be presented as part of a real-time application demonstration titled Worlds First Demonstration of X GRID Application Switching using User Controlled LightPaths.

The demonstrations involve more than 40,000 kilometers of lightpaths stretching between Taiwan, Korea, Canada and Spain to enable multiple GRID applications to be delivered sequentially to the iGrid 2005 meeting in San Diego. Representatives from each participant will demonstrate the setup and switching of the lightpaths from the various GRID applications sources around the world and sequentially projecting them to the attendees at the iGrid 2005 meeting. Bidirectional communication between participants will be performed via a multiple-party HDTV video conferencing system.

The User Controlled LightPaths (UCLP) was first developed as a critical part of Canada’s CA*Net4 advanced network program. UCLP lets end users establish lightpaths and change the configuration without a central network management facility.

This demonstration will show that it is possible for GRID users to quickly establish global optical lightpaths and rapidly exchange data between GRID applications in a real time manner and quickly reconfigure these networks to redistribute GRID feed to other destinations.

iGrid is an international event that strives to accelerate and showcase the use of multi-10Gb international and national networks, to advance scientific research, and to educate decision makers, academicians and industry researchers on the benefits of these hybrid networks. For more information: www.igrid2005.org

The CIMS team participating in the demonstration is led by Director Michael Jemtrud.

Researchers:
Konstantin Privalov
Nicolas Valenzuela
James Hayes
Nathan Dykstra
Ryan Mclennan
Grant Oikawa
Philam Nguyen
Nik Beaudin
Venk Prabhu
Tom Ngo
Marc Léonard
Alla’a Elbadri

Dates and Times of demonstrations:
Monday, September 26th 21h30 - 23h00 EST
Tuesday, September 27th 15h00 - 16h30 EST
Wednesday, September 28th 15h00 - 16h30 EST

Collaborators and Partners:
CANARIE - CA*Net4
Communications Research Canada
Cisco Canada Inc.
National Research Council
Alias Wavefront
IBM

Related Links:
www.cims.carleton.ca
www.canarie.ca/canet4/uclp/igrid2005/demo.html
phi.badlab.crc.ca/uclp
www.salk.edu
www.igrid2005.org