Participation of Russian Institute for Public Networks (RIPN) in the Global SAGE Visualcasting demonstration at SC08

In November, in the area of Information Technology, the international Supercomputing Conference 2008 (SC08) has been one of the key event. The SC Conference is the international conference for high performance computing (HPC), networking, storage and analysis. SC08 marks the 20th anniversary of the first SC Conference, then called Supercomputing, held in Orlando, Florida in 1988.

Traditionally the conference brings together scientists, engineers, researchers, educators, programmers, system administrators and managers, to feature the latest scientific and technical innovations from around the world. A number of presentations and demonstrations are planned to highlight the evolution of a supercomputing, high performance optical networking, storage, analysis, and other related technologies. University of Illinois at Chicago's (UIC) Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL), along with its partners from USA, Korea, Japan, Australia, Russia and the Czech Republic was participating and had become among this year's Bandwidth Challenge finalists at Supercomputing 2008 (SC08).

The Global SAGE Visualcasting demonstration has showed a possibilities of a globally distributed, multi-site transmission of a video streams of a high-resolution 4K(4096x2160) content over high-speed (1GE - 10GE) optical networks to ultra-high-resolution tiled displays, which are controlled by SAGE (Scalable Adaptive Graphics Environment). EVL's Scalable Adaptive Graphics Environment (SAGE) is middleware for streaming ultra-resolution visualizations, multi-channel audio, laptop content, and HD video camera feeds from one or more sources, over multi-gigabit networks to a tiled display. SAGE uses distributed rendering clusters connected with gigabit networks to support real-time collaborative work sessions on-demand.

SAGE Visualcasting is an applications-driven technique to enable distance collaboration by simultaneously replicating and sending multiple visual and audio streams to multiple, variable-sized tiled displays. This is an important advancement over traditional network multicasting, which is not automatically supported by today's networking infrastructure and requires network engineering to implement.

The organizational and technical support for provisioning a 1Gbps lightpath for participating of Russian side at SC08 had been provided by Russian Institute for Public Networks (RIPN) in partnership with Russian Research Centre "Kurchatov Institute" (RRC"KI" - GLORIAD/Russia is based at the RRC"KI"), State Institute of Information Technologies and Telecommunications "Informika".

The technical support for SAGE in Russia to manage multiple high-resolution data streams, interactive visualization and distance collaboration using the large-scale tiled displays over the optical networks had been provided by Space Research Institute (IKI), Russian Academy of Sciences. The networks supporting the Global Visualcasting Showcases at SC08 include CiscoWave (USA), Pacific Wave (USA), National LambdaRail (USA), Michigan LambdaRail (USA), CESNET (Czech Republic), TransLight/StarLight (USA), GLORIAD-Russia, KREONet2 (South Korea), AARNet (Australia) and JGN2plus (Japan).

The participation in multi-site collaborative Global Visualcasting demonstration of streaming a high-resolution content 4K(4096x2160) over high-speed optical networks at SC08 had demonstrated the efficient collaboration and high professional level all international teams in the area of middleware development, software adaptation, and of advanced optical networks to create the experimental global-lambda network environment for researchers. The members of Russian team who participated in the SC08 demonstration are expressing special Acknowledgment to Jason Leigh, Luc Renambot, Maxine Brown, Alan Verlo from Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) at University of Illinois at Chicago's (UIC) for the invitation to participate in the project.

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