The global lambda visualization facility: An international ultra-high-definition wide-area visualization collaboratory

The research outlined in this paper marks an initial global cooperative effort between visualization and collaboration researchers to build a persistent virtual visualization facility linked by ultra-high-speed optical networks. The goal is to enable the comprehensive and synergistic research and development of the necessary hardware, software and interaction techniques to realize the next generation of end-user tools for scientists to collaborate on the global Lambda Grid. This paper outlines some of the visualization research projects that were demonstrated at the iGrid 2005 workshop in San Diego, California.     

Simulating and visualizing the human arterial system on the TeraGrid

We present a Grid solution to a grand challenge problem, the simulation and visualization of the human arterial system. We implemented our simulation and visualization system on the National Science Foundation’s TeraGrid and demonstrated it at the iGrid 2005 conference in San Diego, California. We discuss our experience in running on a computational Grid and present observations and suggestions for improving similar experiences.     

Motion estimation based color transfer and its application to color video compression

In this paper a novel scheme for color video compression using color transfer technique is proposed. Towards this, a new color transfer mechanism for video using motion estimation is presented. Encoder and decoder architectures for the proposed compression scheme are also presented. In this scheme, compression is achieved by firstly discarding chrominance information for all but selected reference frames and then using motion prediction and discrete cosine transform (DCT) based quantization. At decompression stage, the luminance-only frames are colored using chrominance information from the reference frames applying the proposed color transfer technique. To integrate color transfer mechanism with hybrid compression scheme a new color transfer protocol is defined. Both compression scheme and color transfer work in YCbCr color space.

Video transcoding in a Grid network with User Controlled LightPaths

GridON is an application that converts high-resolution broadcast video into MPEG-2 format, thereby reducing the file size and resolution. The application uses the user controlled lightpaths (UCLP) software to create on-demand, end-to-end, high-bandwidth dedicated connections to access remote computers. The converted MPEG-2 files can be distributed much faster and further than the source files to these dispersed computers, for reassembly into the higher resolution format. This paper describes the demonstration that took place last September at the iGrid 2005 conference held in San Diego. As a proof of concept, we successfully demonstrated that a video transfer in a Grid network environment can be integrated with a user-controlled lightpath provisioning system.     

Building a 100 Mpixel graphics device for the OptIPuter

Wide area optical lambda networks create new possibilities for data-intensive scientific research and collaboration. One initiative to create novel infrastructure is the OptIPuter project which aims to build a distributed virtual computer using optical networks. At the iGrid2005 venue, an experiment was conducted on how a 100 Mpixel display device in San Diego could be driven by a remote 100 Mpixel graphics device in Amsterdam. The experiment showed the viability of such a setup, thereby validating one specific part of the OptIPuter concept: geographic separation of 100 Mpixel graphics- and display device. A key element in our setup is the use of unreliable communication.     

The first functional demonstration of optical virtual concatenation as a technique for achieving Terabit networking

The optical virtual concatenation (OVC) function of The Terabit LAN was demonstrated for the first time at the iGrid 2005 workshop in San Diego, California. The TERAbit-LAN establishes a lambda group path (LGP) for an application where the number of lambdas/L2 connections in a LGP can be specified by the application. Each LGP is logically treated as one end-to-end optical path, so during parallel transport, the LGP channels have no relative latency deviation. However, optical path diversity (e.g. restoration) can cause LGP relative latency deviations and negatively affect quality of service. OVC hardware developed by NTT compensates for relative latency deviations to achieve a virtual bulk transport for the Electronic Visualization Laboratory’s (EVL) Scalable Adaptive Graphics Environment application.     

Seamless live migration of virtual machines over the MAN/WAN

The “VM Turntable” demonstrator at iGRID 2005 pioneered the integration of Virtual Machines (VMs) with deterministic “lightpath” network services across a MAN/WAN. The results provide for a new stage of virtualization—one for which computation is no longer localized within a data center but rather can be migrated across geographical distances, with negligible downtime, transparently to running applications and external clients. A noteworthy data point indicates that a live VM was migrated between Amsterdam, NL and San Diego, USA with just 1–2 s of application downtime. When compared to intra-LAN local migrations, downtime is only about 5–10 times greater despite 1000 times higher round-trip times.     

High-definition multimedia for multiparty low-latency interactive communication

We describe a high-quality collaborative environment that uses High-Definition (HD) video to achieve near realistic perception of a remote site. The capture part, consisting of a HD camera, Centaurus HD-SDI capture card, and UltraGrid software, produces a 1.5 Gbps UDP data stream of uncompressed HD video that is transferred over a 10GE network interface to the high-speed IP network. The HD video stream displaying uses either a software-based solution with color depth down-sampling and field de-interlacing, or another Centaurus card. Data distribution to individual participants of the videoconference is achieved using a user-controlled UDP packet reflector based on the Active Element idea. The viability of this system has been demonstrated at the iGrid 2005 conference for a three-way high quality videoconference among sites in the Czech Republic, Louisiana, and California.     

Highly interactive distributed visualization

We report on our iGrid2005 demonstration, called the “Dead Cat Demo”; an example of a highly interactive augmented reality application consisting of software services distributed over a wide-area, high-speed network. We describe our design decisions, analyse the implications of the design on application performance and show performance measurements.     

Data mining middleware for wide-area high-performance networks

In this paper, we describe two distributed, data intensive applications that were demonstrated at iGrid 2005 (iGrid Demonstration US109 and iGrid Demonstration US121). One involves transporting astronomical data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) and the other involves computing histograms from multiple high-volume data streams. Both rely on newly developed data transport and data mining middleware. Specifically, we describe a new version of the UDT network protocol called Composible-UDT, a file transfer utility based upon UDT called UDT-Gateway, and an application for building histograms on high-volume data flows called BESH (for Best Effort Streaming Histogram). For both demonstrations, we include a summary of the experimental studies performed at iGrid 2005.     

The network infrastructure at iGrid2005: Lambda networking in action

iGrid2005’s goal was to demonstrate the potential of hybrid networks showing applications that require the use of these high-performance multi-gigabit networks. In this article we describe the network infrastructure in place during the workshop, we focus on the innovative and original aspects of the set-up, and we show that the infrastructure was a clear example of lambda networking.     

MPEG-4视频传输框架的设计与实现

基于IP网络的实时视音频传输在科研、工业、军事等方面具有重要意义。文章分析了基于RTP的MPEG-4视频传输框架,给出了MPEG-4视频流的RTP组包算法,实现了一个基本的实时视频传输系统。     

Personal Varrier: Autostereoscopic virtual reality display for distributed scientific visualization

As scientific data sets increase in size, dimensionality, and complexity, new high resolution, interactive, collaborative networked display systems are required to view them in real-time. Increasingly, the principles of virtual reality (VR) are being applied to modern scientific visualization. One of the tenets of VR is stereoscopic (stereo or 3d) display; however the need to wear stereo glasses or other gear to experience the virtual world is encumbering and hinders other positive aspects of VR such as collaboration. Autostereoscopic (autostereo) displays presented imagery in 3d without the need to wear glasses or other gear, but few qualify as VR displays. The Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) has designed and built a single-screen version of its 35-panel tiled Varrier display, called Personal Varrier. Based on a static parallax barrier and the Varrier computational method, Personal Varrier provides a quality 3d autostereo experience in an economical, compact form factor. The system debuted at iGrid 2005 in San Diego, CA, accompanied by a suite of distributed and local scientific visualization and 3d teleconferencing applications. The CAVEwave National LambdaRail (NLR) network was vital to the success of the stereo teleconferencing.     

Distributed election in complete networks

An improved version of Afek and Gafni's synchronous algorithm for distributed election in complete networks is given and anO(n) expected message complexity is shown. M.Y. Chan received her Ph.D. in 1988 from the University of Hong Kong, and her M.S. and B.A. degrees in computer science from the University of California, San Diego in 1980 and 1981, respectively. She is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Texas at Dallas. Francis Y.L. Chin (S71-M76-SM85) received the B.Sc. degree in engineering science from the University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada, in 1972, and the M.S., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering and computer science from Princeton University, New Jersey, in 1974, 1975, and 1976, respectively. Since 1975, he has taught at the University of Maryland, Baltimore Country, University of California, San Diego, University of Alberta, and Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is currently Head of the Department of Computer Science, University of Hong Kong. He has served as a program co-chairman of the 1988 International Conference on Computer Processing of Chinese and Oriental Languages (Toronto) and the International Computer Science Conference '88 (Hong Kong). His current research interests include algorithm design and analysis, parallel and distributed computing.     

Advances in ESL Design

This is the second of two roundtables on electronic system-level (ESL) design, which recently has been seen as an advance in the EDA community--the latest attempt to improve designer productivity, shorten design time and cost, and improve design quality. Of course, "ESL" means different things to different people, and the notion varies even geographically--for example, between the US and Europe. The goal of this roundtable is to identify expectations and any meaningful advances associated with the notion of ESL design. What are the promising developments in the area? Which problems are relevant, and which are not? IEEE Design & Test thanks the roundtable participants: moderator Rajesh Gupta (University of California, San Diego), Arvind (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Gerard Berry (Esterel Technologies), and Forrest Brewer (University of California, Santa Barbara). D&T gratefully acknowledges the help of Roundtables Editor Bill Joyner (Semiconductor Research Corp.), who organized the event.     

ITU-T standardization activities for interactive multimedia communications on packet-based networks: H.323 and related recommendations

The Telecommunication Sector of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU-T) has developed a series of recommendations together comprising the H.323 system that provides for multimedia communications in packet-based (inter)networks. This series of recommendations describe the types and functions of H.323 terminals and other H.323 devices as well as their interactions. The H.323 series of recommendations includes audio, video and data streams, but an H.323 system minimally requires only an audio stream to be supported. Motivated by straightforward interoperability with the ISDN and PSTN networks and a variety of other protocols, the recommendation H.323 has been accepted as being the standard for IP telephony, developed by the ITU-T and broadly backed by the industry—which is also adopted by both the Voice over IP (VoIP) forum and the European Telecommunication Standards Institute (ETSI). This paper presents an overview of the H.323 system architecture with all its functional components and protocols and points out all the related specifications.     

The encyclopedia of life project: Grid software and deployment

The ongoing global effort of genome sequencing is making large scale comparative proteomic analysis an intriguing task. The Encyclopedia of Life (EOL; http://eol.sdsc.edu) project aims to provide current functional and structural annotations for all available proteomes, a computational challenge never seen before in biology. Using an integrative genome annotation pipeline (iGAP), we have produced 3D models and functional annotations for more than 100 proteomes thus far. This process is greatly facilitated by grid compute resources, and especially by the development of grid application execution environment. AppLeS (Application-Level Scheduling) Parameter Sweep Template (APST) has been adopted by the EOL project as a mediator to grid middleware. APST has made the annotation process much more efficient, highly automated and scalable. Currently we are building a domain-specific bioinformatics workflow management system (BWMS) on top of APST, which further streamlines grid deployment of life science applications. With these developments in mind, we discuss some common problems and expectations of grid computing for high throughput proteomics. Henri Casanova, Ph.D.: He is an adjunct Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), a Research Scientist at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, and the founder and director of the Grid Research and Development Laboratory (GRAIL) at UCSD. His research interests are in the area of parallel, distributed, Grid and Internet computing. He obtained his B.S. from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Electronique, d’Electrotechnique, d’Informatique et d’Hydraulique de Toulouse, France in 1993, his M.S. from the Université Paul Sabatier, Toulouse, France in 1994, and his Ph.D. from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville in 1998. Francine Berman, Ph.D.: She is a Professor and High Performance Computing Endowed Chair at U.C. San Diego, Director of the San Diego Supercomputer Center and a Fellow of the ACM. Her research over two decades has focused on High Performance and Grid Computing, in particular in the areas of programming environments, adaptive middleware, scheduling and performance prediction. She has served on numerous editorial boards, steering committees, and program and conference committees in the areas of Parallel and Grid computing. She is one of the Principal Investigators of the NSF-supported TeraGrid, and directs NSF’s National Partnership for Advanced Computing Infrastructure (NPACI). Peter Arzberger, Ph.D.: He is the Director of Life Sciences Initiatives, University of California San Diego, Director of the National Biomedical Computation Resource (http://nbcr.ucsd.edu), funded by the National Center of Research Resource of NIH and the Chair of the Pacific Rim Application and Grid Middleware Assembly (http://www.pragma-grid.edu), an organization of 20 institutions around the pacific rim whose mission is to establish sustained collaborations and to advance the use of grid technologies in applications. He serves on the US National CODATA Committee and the National Advisory Board of the US Long Term Ecological Research. His hobby is working on Lloyds. Mark A. Miller, Ph.D.: He is Program Coordinator for the Integrative BioSciences Program at San Diego Supercomputer Center. He received his Ph.D. in Biochemistry from Purdue University in 1984. His research interests have slowly moved towards computer driven analyses and quantitative biology, and culminated in managing the BioInformatics Core of the Joint Center for Structural Biology where he helped to plan and implement the informatics solutions for high throughput crystallography. He is currently working on the specification, design and deployment of tools to enable biology research. Philip Bourne, Ph.D.: He is a Professor of Pharmacology at the University of California, San Diego and co-director of the Protein Data Bank (PDB). He is immediate past President of the International Society for Computational Biology, an Associate Editor of Bioinformatics and on the Editorial Board of several other journals. He received his B.Sc. and Ph.D. in chemistry at the Flinders University, South Australia. His research interests include bioinformatics, particularly structural bioinformatics. This implies algorithms, metalanguages, biological databases, biological query languages and visualization with special interest in cell signaling and apoptosis. Major projects ongoing in the Bourne Lab include the PDB, Encyclopedia of Life (EOL), Systematic Protein Annotation and Modeling (SPAM), and the Tree of Life. Bourne’s personal interests include fishing, tennis, squash, walking, skiing, sports cars, motor bikes and writing.     

Naming symmetric processes using shared variables

Summary Implementations of inter-process communication and synchronization in distributed systems usually rely on the existence of unique ids for the processes. We consider the problem of generating such ids for identical processes in a shared-variable system. A randomized protocol that assigns distinct ids to the processes within an expected polynomial number of rounds using a polynomial number of boolean atomic variables is presented. Ömer Eeciolu obtained his Ph.D. degree in mathematics from the University of California, San Diego in 1984. At present he is an Associate Professor in the Computer Science department of the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he has been on the faculty since 1985. His principal areas of research are parallel algorithms, bijective and enumerative combinatorics, and combinatorial algorithms. His current interest in parallel algorithms involve approximation and numerical techniques on distributed memory systems while his combinatorial interests center around computational geometry, bijective methods, and ranking algorithms for combinatorial structures. Ambuj K. Singh is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin in 1989, an M.S. in Computer Science from Iowa State University in 1984, and a B. Tech. from the Indian Institute of Technology at Kharagpur in 1982. His research interests are in the areas of adaptive resource allocation, concurrent program development, and distributed shared memory.Work supported in part by NSF grants CCR-9008628 and CCR-9223094     

Evaluation of video payload over low latency networks: Flexilink

ABSTRACT

Broadcast organisations need to handle both time deterministic traffic and best effort traffic. The adoption of packet networks allows a single converged network for handling both real-time (RT) media traffic as well as data traffic. Due to the historic pervasive growth of IP network, they are widely used to realise this converged network. However, they do have several drawbacks like big header size, software switching delays and inability to support multiple addressing schemes. To overcome these issues, solutions like traffic engineering, quality of service and over-provisioning are implemented in IP networks but has resulted in higher cost, power and system requirements. Flexilink network has been tested for audio payloads using simulation model and outperforms any existing RT network by providing an exceptional average end-to-end delay of microsecond range and a jitter below the audible threshold for live digital audio streaming. However, it is not tested for video payloads. A review of various networks used RT media distribution is included in this paper. The Flexilink architecture design modification to support the most widely used video formats such as MPEG-TS, MPEG-PS and SDI streams is explained. The average delay for multiple video streams over Flexilink is provided using simulation model. The recommendation for testing Flexilink using hardware is also explained in this paper.

The Flexilink Mac design uses dual-buffer system to handle AF (asynchronous flow) and SF (synchronous flow) separately, with the Frame structure that supports current Ethernet frames.