Departments
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Week of 10 September 1999 |
Vol. III, No. 5 |
Feature
Article
Chautauqua to highlight new Web technology
By David J. Craig
Scientists and engineers from across the United States will come together for a supercomputing conference at BU September 13 through 16, but many won't really be leaving home.
Sponsored by a consortium of 50 research institutions called the National Computational Science Alliance (Alliance), the conference is being transmitted over an electronic network more powerful than the popular Internet.
The event is the Alliance's first test of its video teleconferencing system -- called the Access Grid -- which allows scientists from labs across the country to meet and exchange ideas virtually, without sacrificing valuable research time traveling to conferences.
"The idea is to allow people to see each other and talk in real time, whether or not they have the time or the budget to travel and actually be together," says Alliance spokeswoman Karen Green. "That's something you can't yet do over the Internet."
The event, which will be held in the Conference Auditorium at the George Sherman Union, is the third in a series of nationwide Alliance meetings dubbed "Chautauquas," a Seneca Indian word for "gatherings." The term also was used to describe institutions that flourished in the late 19th century and provided popular education through lectures, concerts, and plays. The BU event will feature presentations on high-end computing and networking, as well as a multimedia arts exhibition, all broadcast to distant participants who will be able to converse with one another and with the speakers at BU.
The purpose of the Chautauquas is to introduce supercomputing technologies -- such as that used in the video teleconference -- to a broad range of researchers and educators. "This is really the first step toward creating virtual workspace," says Green. "Eventually, people in business will have to travel less and students at a community college will be able to enroll in a course being taught anywhere in the world."
The Access Grid, which uses the federally maintained Very High-Speed Backbone Network Services (VBNS) as its network infrastructure, now allows researchers at a dozen sites across the country to interact electronically. People at five Grid access sites, or nodes, are expected to tune in for the video teleconference at BU.
Video teleconferences traditionally use leased telephone lines and accommodate only two or three participants, according to Glenn Bresnahan, director of scientific computing and visualization in the BU Office of Information Technology. But the Grid allows large numbers of people in different locations to see and interact with one another and even work together on computer programs such as Powerpoint.
"An Alliance committee I'm on gets together physically to meet every quarter, but in October we're planning on meeting by teleconference," says Bresnahan. "It will be great to spend less time in airports and more on our work."
At present it is mainly large research institutions that have access to powerful, high-bandwidth networks such as VBNS, but conference organizers hope the technology will eventually be as ubiquitous and accessible as the Internet.
The equipment to coordinate a video teleconference has become relatively affordable within the last year, says Bresnahan, who will speak at the conference about how institutions can access the Grid. It now costs about $50,000 in hardware to build a node connection.To take part in the Chautauqua next week, he says, each long-distance participant must have the hardware equivalent of four personal computers and special video and audio software.
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Jennifer Teig von Hoffman, a
computer analyst in the BU Office of Information
Technology, and Russ Wolf, an OIT systems
programmer administrator, fine-tune hardware that
will be used during a long-distance video
teleconference at next week's Chautauqua conference
at BU. Photo by Kalman
Zabarsky
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The implications of the Grid technology should be far-reaching. In addition to facilitating teleconferences and distance education, according to Bresnahan, it already has been used by medical experts to observe surgery hundreds of miles away and advise surgeons in the middle of an operation. And the Grid will be used at BU for distance teaching as early as next month, he says.
Roscoe Giles, ENG associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, says that because the Grid -- unlike many proprietary networks -- is being developed in the public domain and can be used for a variety of educational functions, it has the potential to break down barriers that have reduced access to technology among some members of society.
"I'm hoping to build bridges to minority-serving institutions and to help them build these nodes," he says. "There are a lot of people who have been on the outside of the development of core technologies, and these Chautauquas offer a great opportunity to redress some imbalances in society in this area.
"The reason this is of great interest to me is because everyone can use it," Giles continues. "You don't want to have some new superphone if you can only use it to talk to your friends and family."
The BU Chautauqua also will feature a 3-D work created by the BU-based consortium High Performance Computing in the Arts (HiPArt). "Spirited Ruins," a virtual reality replica of a long-lost civilization, was produced by a collaboration of 29 researchers and artists. Visitors at the Grid nodes across the country will be able to tour the remains of an imaginary ancient palace, interact with sculptures that produce music, and chat with other visitors.
"It's as if the viewer is an archaeologist discovering a lost environment and watching the ruins come to life," says Laura Giannitrapani, a graphics consultant in the Office of Information Technology. "But we don't really know what people will do when they get in there. I expect there will be some sword fights, because there are swords lying around."
The Alliance is funded by the National Science Foundation. To learn more about the BU Chautauqua or to register to attend, visit chautauqua.bu.edu.