GLVF: OptIPuter SAGE Visualcasting @ GLIF 2007

At the 7th Annual Global LambdaGrid Workshop held in Prague, the Global Lambda Visualization Facility (GLVF), an international team of computer and application scientists, announced the results of a distributed pixel streaming experiment using the new Visualcasting feature of SAGE, the Scalable Adaptive Graphics Environment. SAGE is being developed as part of the NSF-funded OptIPuter project.

SAGE enables individual sites to generate visualizations and animations using in-house specialized and/or proprietary hardware and software, and then send streams of pixel information to a partner site so collaborators can see the results. Visualcasting extends this capability to multiple networked users by replicating the streams to multiple sites simultaneously, enabling partners to collaboratively work in a shared session.

For this experiment, multi-gigabit, high-resolution scientific visualizations were streamed from data stores at Calit2 in San Diego and at StarLight in Chicago to tiled display walls at EVL (Chicago), SARA (Amsterdam) and Masaryk University (Czech Republic). Two different animations were streamed; one was sent to four locations, and the other was sent to two locations. Each endpoint ran SAGE to send and/or receive the real-time streams.

The ultra-high-resolution NCSA Milky Way galaxy animation, stored on disk at Calit2 in San Diego, was streamed at 1Gbps to StarLight in Chicago. There, a SAGE Bridge cluster replicated the streams, sending 1Gbps to each of the four GLVF partner sites for simultaneous viewing. A second animation, NCSA’s Tornado, stored at the StarLight facility, was streamed to nearby EVL, where another SAGE Bridge cluster replicated the information to two of the four sites.

This SAGE visualcasting experiment was conducted prior to the GLIF 2007 meeting, on September 12-13, 2007.

URL:

www.evl.uic.edu/cavern/sage
www.evl.uic.edu/cavern/glvf

Collaborators:

USA:
Electronic Visualization Laboratory, University of Illinois at Chicago
Calit2/University of California, San Diego

Netherlands:
SARA

Czech Republic:
Masaryk University