Grid Browser

With the development of ACCESS (Alliance Center for
Collaboration Education Science and Software) and the
proposed concept of multiple points of conectivity
on the National Technology Grid, a hardware system
is coming into place to achieve a truly distributed
connectivity for the Alliance. What is now needed to
tie these points together with the Center is a new
software application. A Grid Browser is needed. What
Mosaic was to the Internet the Grid browser will be
to the Gridscape.

A Grid browser will be able to handle Virtual Environments(VE),
Multicast or point to point video tele-conferencing(VTC),
display static images (i.e. power point slides, photographs
or illustartions), display www pages, and allow for streaming 
video in and out. The concept is that 1 application can
handle multiple input from video, audio and static imagery
using the CAVE Library as a driver. By using the tools
created by the NCSA's Virtual Director and the video 
imaging technology from Sandin's "Video Avatars" a powerful
new application can be created to handle communicating
on the Grid.

Users will be able to select and place objects freely in an
unbounded virtual 2D plane made possible by the 
CAVE Libraries already developed. These objects could display
a wide range of imagery (video, animation, www or static imagery).
These objects can be iconified, hidden, or magnified to
fill the entire screen. Users will be able to control
video objects througn manipulation of the audio and video 
from each remote site. Control information can also be displayed.
A Grid browser would also be able to link into and allow collaboration
with persistent virtual environments. And, naturally all or selected
parts from the application could be streamed over the Internet.

We, the Alliance, have the resources to create this software
application which can become the basis for distributed networking.

Here is a sample hardware configuration for the Grid Browser:

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

tcoffin@ncsa.uiuc.edu

Last modified: December 29, 1998