News

For Immediate Release

Media Contacts:
Warren R. Froelich
froelich@sdsc.edu
858-822-3622

Doug Ramsey
dramsey@ucsd.edu
858-822-5825

San Diego, Calif. -- UC San Diego will open its doors Wednesday, October 10 to visitors attending the fall 2007 Internet2 Network Performance Workshop, a gathering of some of the nation's leading researchers and educators in advanced networking.

About 500 members of the Internet2 community are expected to participate in tours at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) and the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2), both at UCSD. Some of the latest innovations and applications in the field are slated to be showcased.

The fall meeting, taking place October 8-11 at the Town & Country Resort and Convention Center, is hosted by the university and will also feature talks during its general sessions by Fran Berman, SDSC's director, who will be moderating a panel October 11 on "Cyberstructure: The Way Forward;" and Calit2 director Larry Smarr, whose keynote on October 9 will focus on "lambda networking."

Some of the demonstrations planned for SDSC include:

• AmericaView: Delivering Remote Sensing Data via Internet2. The goal here is to give users fast access to large data objects in the AmericaView collection, which features historic and current satellite remote sensing imagery from across the United States. Developed by Stephen F. Austin University.
  
• Codian High Definition MCU and IP Video Conference Recorder. Demonstrations are expected to show how this technology can transform standard definition and enhanced definition images by up to 4 times the resolution, for superior quality images consistently, no matter their origin. Developed by Codian.
  
• Globus MEDICUS: Federation of DICOM Medical Imaging Devices into HealthGrid. This open-source project integrates grid technology for healthcare and clinical research, allowing images to be stored and discovered anywhere on the grid, including remote field hospitals. Developed by the University of Southern California.
  
• Enabling Virtual Organizations. This system, released June 2007, is targeted to the high energy and nuclear physics community who will require enhanced networking performance as they enter the startup period of the LHC, the world's large physics experiment, based at CERN in Switzerland. Developed by the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).
  
• Internet2 Commons Virtual Demo Room. Vendors on the show room floor are expected be able to connect to anyone, anywhere in the world with Internet2 Commons, allowing participants to ask questions and remotely see demonstrations of the vendor's equipment. Developed by Internet2 and The Ohio State University.
  
• IOCOM HD: Redefining Telepresence. This software (formerly inSORS) was recently enhanced, with the goal of providing several high-definition resolutions without unreasonable bandwidth demands. Developed by IOCOM.
  
• SCOPIA Desktop: A Revolutionary Way to Connect. Using this software is expected to allow a video network to be accessible to any member of an organization, enhancing collaborations. Developed by RADVISION.
  
• Video Communication Using Scalable Video Coding. The goal here is to allow broad-based deployment of video communications, bringing price, performance and quality of video communication in line with user expectations. Developed by Layered Media.

SDSC experts also will demonstrate the latest earthquake simulations for Southern California in the Synthesis Center, housed in the Calit2 headquarters building, Atkinson Hall. The TeraShake project offers second-by-second details of the impact of the potential major earthquake along the Southern San Andreas Fault.

The UCSD Division of Calit2 also will offer a series of visualization and networking demonstrations in Atkinson Hall:

• 4K and Persistent Portal. Calit2's Smarr will welcome visitors and narrate a showing of super-high-resolution videos shown in the 4K digital cinema format (four times the resolution of HDTV), as well as a real-time, uncompressed HD videoconference over a 'persistent portal' linking UCSD and the University of Washington.
  
• CineGrid. The demo will also feature real-time 4K video streaming over dedicated lambda networking from the University of Southern California (USC) School of Cinematic Arts, a member of the Calit2-sponsored CineGrid project.
  
• Stereo Visualization. Calit2 will give Internet2 visitors a chance to watch a series of scientific visualizations in 3D, as well as interactive visualizations of high-resolution imagery on the newly-built StarCave (a newly-built, 360-degree virtual-reality environment), and a fly-over of Mars on a large tiled 'autostereo' display that features 3D - but without having to wear 3D glasses.
  
• CAMERA. Visitors will also learn about Calit2's CAMERA marine microbial metagenomics project from executive director Paul Gilna, including a tour of the server room that houses the growing tidal wave of sequences and metadata from J. Craig Venter's round-the-world sampling of marine microbes.

Buses will depart from the main Internet2 conference site at 1:30pm and 3pm, and shuttles will transfer visitors between SDSC and Calit2. There will be two sessions of demos: 2pm-3:30pm, and 3:30pm-5pm.

Internet2 is the foremost U.S. advanced networking consortium. Led by the research and education community since 1996, Internet2 promotes the missions of its members by providing both leading-edge network capabilities and unique partnership opportunities that together facilitate the development, deployment and use of revolutionary Internet technologies.

###