In spring 2007, Louisiana State University (LSU) Center for Computation and Technology (CCT) professor Thomas Sterling taught the first distributed classroom course in the U.S. using high-definition (HD) video broadcast.
Sterling, a renowned high-performance computing (HPC) researcher, lectured weekly to students participating from LSU, Louisiana Tech University, University of Arkansas, MCNC in North Carolina, and Masaryk University in the Czech Republic, as part of a semester-long course “High-Performance Computing: Concepts, Methods and Means”.
The uncompressed HD video streams were transmitted to the Czech Republic via National Science Foundation’s IRNC TransLight/StarLight link between the U.S. and Europe (as well as the SURFnet link). Statewide research and education optical networks Louisiana Optical Network Initiative (LONI) and the Arkansas Research and Education Optical Network (ARE-ON), and the nationwide optical network National LambdaRail, helped support the course to locations in the U.S.
Virtual presence requires high-quality HD video and two-way audio transmission with minimum latency. A single raw HD stream consumes about 1.5Gbps of bandwidth, and multi-site virtual meetings like this course can easily saturate a 10Gbps link. This far exceeds the on-demand bandwidth available on the Internet, though course organizers distributed the course via the Internet to Access Grids at select sites that did not have optical connections and/or HD technologies in place.
In collaboration with Nortel, Northwestern University is working on a dynamic optical multicast technique for disseminating streams in lieu of the stream replication method currently used. The optical multicast equipment and the computers used for multicast replication are homed at StarLight. Both L1 dynamic optical multicast and L2 multicast were demonstrated at SC 2006.
Multicasting digital media using L1/L2 transport provides a number of significant benefits, including higher performance, enhanced management, cost effectiveness, and quality of service. Optical multicast allows for much larger streams than packet routed networks, e.g. multicast at multiple Gbps. In this context, high-performance refers to reliable, consistent, high-quality delivered service, with minimal jitter and latency over very long distances.
URL:
http://www.cct.lsu.edu/news/news/203/
http://www.icair.org/
Collaborators:
Canada:
Nortel Networks
Czech Republic:
Masaryk University
CESNET
USA:
Louisiana State University, Center for Computation and Technology
Louisiana Tech University
University of Arkansas
Arkansas Research and Education Optical Network (ARE-ON)
MCNC
Louisiana Optical Network Initiative (LONI)
National LambdaRail
Northwestern University/iCAIR
StarLight
