A major demonstration of international collaboration using advanced high-speed networks to access geographically-distributed computing, storage, and display resources will take place on the convention floor of this year's SC'98 high-performance computing and networking conference. The International Grid (iGrid) research booth, organized by the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) at the University of Illinois at Chicago and Indiana University (IU), will provide global connectivity to enable collaborators from the United States, Australia, Canada, Germany, Japan, The Netherlands, Russia, Singapore, Switzerland, and Taiwan to solve complex computational problems. The people, the data, and the computers can reside locally, on the show floor, or remotely, at various home institutions worldwide.

iGrid will showcase almost two dozen global case studies to justify and promote this worldwide advanced computational infrastructure. "The complementary nature of research being conducted both within and outside the US and the ability to access unique data and computing resources are compelling reasons to construct global interoperable broadband networks," explains Michael McRobbie, vice president for information technology at IU and co-sponsor of the iGrid demonstrations. "The iGrid demonstrations will present attendees with a glimpse into the future of computing."

Conversely, the demands of these applications will demonstrate increased expectations for bandwidth, quality of service, and connectivity. "Advanced networks promise to break down barriers of time and distance and to encourage virtual team problem solving despite geographic boundaries-provided they are engineered to do what application developers expect them to do," cautions Tom DeFanti, director of EVL and co-sponsor of the iGrid demonstrations.

Applications in education, environmental hydrology, cosmology, medical imaging, molecular biology, and manufacturing will use technologies such as remote instrumentation control, tele-immersion, real-time client server systems, multimedia, tele-teaching, and digital video, as well as distributed computing and high-throughput, high-priority data transfers. These applications and underlying technologies will depend on end-to-end delivery of multi-tens-of-megabits bandwidth with Quality of Service control, and will need the capabilities of emerging Internet protocols for resource control and reservation.

Applications to be demonstrated include "Metacomputing and Collaborative Visualization" (USA/Germany); "Distributed Virtual Reality in Collaborative Product Design" (USA/Germany); "Remote Visualization of Electron Microscopy Data" (USA/Singapore/Japan); "Digital Video Stream using IEEE 1394 Encapsulated into IP over Long Distance" (USA/Japan); "Architectural Walk-Through Coupled with a Parallel Lighting Simulation" (The Netherlands); "Physics and Geology Education Network" (Russia); "Maximum Likelihood Analysis of Phylogenetic Data" (USA/Singapore/Australia); "CAVERNsoft Tele-Immersive Collaboratories through the iGrid Portal" (USA/Singapore/Japan/Australia); "Tele-Manufacturing" (USA/Singapore); "Globe internet Digital Video Network" (USA/Singapore); "A Java3D Particle Collision Event Viewer" (USA/Switzerland); "Construction of Numerical Wind Tunnel" (Taiwan), and "Parallel Computation of High-Speed Train Aerodynamics" (Taiwan). Two additional iGrid applications, "Industrial Mold Filling Simulation" (USA/Canada) and "Colliding Black Holes and Neutron Stars" (USA/Germany) are also SC'98 High Performance Computing (HPC) Challenge entries; they will be reviewed by a panel of judges at SC'98 for their innovative "on-the-edge" methods for Grand Challenge problem solving. More information about iGrid applications can be found on the Web (http://www.startap.net/igrid).

The centerpiece of the advanced computational infrastructure enabling these international demonstrations is the National Science Foundation (NSF) sponsored initiative STAR TAP-the Science, Technology And Research Transit Access Point. Started in 1997, STAR TAP anchors the NSF vBNS (very high-speed Backbone Network Service) international program. Networks from Canada (CAnet-2), Singapore (SingaREN), Taiwan (TANet), Russia (MirNET), and the Asian-Pacific Advanced Network consortium (APAN) are connected; Indiana University is the lead institution of the APAN-US joint venture, named TransPAC (http://www.transpac.org). STAR TAP connections to the Nordic countries (NORDUnet), Netherlands (SURFnet), France (RENATER), and Israel are imminent. Other US federal agency advanced networks, notably the Department of Defense DREN, Department of Energy ESnet, and NASA NREN are also connected to STAR TAP. STAR TAP is managed by the Electronic Visualization Laboratory, the Mathematics and Computer Science Division of Argonne National Laboratory, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Chicago's Ameritech Advanced Data Services.

The Electronic Visualization Laboratory and Indiana University, members of NCSA's National Computational Science Alliance partnership, are working to advance the development of an International Technology Grid. The Grid is a prototype 21st century computational and information infrastructure integrating high-performance computers, visualization environments, remote instruments, and massive databases via high-speed networks to support advanced applications.

EVL (http://www.evl.uic.edu) is a graduate research laboratory specializing in virtual reality and real-time interactive computer graphics; it is a joint effort of UIC's College of Engineering and School of Art and Design, and represents the oldest formal collaboration between engineering and art in the country offering graduate degrees to those specializing in visualization. Having received recognition for developing the CAVE™ and ImmersaDesk™ virtual reality systems, EVL's current research focus is tele-immersion-having users in different locations around the world collaborate over high-speed networks in shared, virtual environments as if they were together in the same room. Related research interests include scientific visualization, new methodologies for informal science and engineering education, paradigms for information display, distributed computing, sonification, human/computer interfaces, every citizen interfaces, and abstract math visualization. Major funding is provided by the National Science Foundation.

Indiana University (http://www.indiana.edu) is one of the oldest state universities in the Midwest and is also one of the largest universities in the US, with more than 100,000 students, faculty, and staff on 8 campuses. IU was recently selected to host the network operations center for Abilene, an Internet2 backbone network for research and education, announced by Vice President Al Gore earlier this year. More recently, the National Science Foundation awarded the University a $10M grant to develop the international high performance research and education network connection, TransPAC, between the USA and the Asia Pacific Rim.

Contact:
Maxine Brown
Electronic Visualization Laboratory, University of Illinois at Chicago
maxine@uic.edu
ph: +1.312.996.3002

Karen Adams
Office of the Vice President for Information Technology, Indiana University
kadams@indiana.edu
ph: +1.812.855.5752