Scalable High-Resolution Wide Area Collaboration over the Access Grid
Lisa Childers, Terry Disz, Bob Olson, and Rick Stevens
Futures Laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory

The Access Grid is the ensemble of resources used to support group-to-group human interaction across the grid. It consists of large-format multimedia displays, presentation and interactive software environments, interfaces to grid middleware, and interfaces to remote visualization environments. The Access Grid is designed to support large-scale distributed meetings, collaborative teamwork sessions, seminars, lectures, tutorials and training. The Access Grid design point is small (3-20 people per site) but promotes group-to-group collaboration and communication. Large-format displays integrated with intelligent or active meeting rooms are a central feature of Access Grid nodes, and are primary new features extending collaboration technology from the desktop. Access Grid Nodes are "designed spaces" that explicitly support the high-end audio and visual technology needed to provide a high-quality compelling and productive user experience.

For this demonstration, select Access Grid nodes will use inexpensive or public domain JPEG encoders and decoders to deliver multiple high resolution, high frame rate video streams in addition to the traditional h.261 video streams used by the Access Grid today. The goal of the demonstration is to show both the future of scalable wide area collaboration and to stress today’s networks with the requirement of high bandwidth low latency delivery of information. The demonstration will show multiple live group to group interactions as well as interactions with computer simulations via manipulation within the video windows.

A typical Access Grid session may contain several dozens of live or computer-generated video streams, as seen here: