The Blog

   Accessing the Grid...

So, this morning we got to see the internet used the way I always thought it ought to be. Or, at least, the way the advertising makes it out to me. At this moment, I'm listening to a talk on visualising scientific modelling (ie. making pretty pictures out of ugly numbers) given by Christ Johnson at the University of Utah.

A video camera is recording his movements, a microphone his works, and a VNC session is capturing his computer screen. All of these are then transmitted over the internet to us, where the visual is projected out onto the wall, one projector displaying the video, the other his powerpoint presentation. Several large speakers give us his voice in stereo goodness.

Of course, the missing piece of this puzzle is that he can see us, due to two cameras here. And there are a bunch of people in Adelaide, and a few more in Western Australia watching and participating too. Their video feeds are being projected off to the side of the wall.

And from the talk, here's a question for graphics students, which I'll pitch at Tony: "If a polygon falls on the view plane and nobody sees it, does it still exist?" I wasn't sure, but the speaker informs us that it doesn't.

Back to the description of the system known as the Access Grid. This morning, we've had three lectures, one from a guy in New York where they've been promised eight inches of snow tonight, and then another from Jack Dongarra from Tennessee, who is responsible for the Top 500 list of supercomputers. He talked about the list and how it's calculated, what is wrong with the system and the new benchmarking system that they are working on developing. Perhaps the most interesting graph he showed was linux adoption in supercomputer systems over the years, which has been going up exponentially.

There have been problems. Tennessee had no audio so he had to phone Rockhampton where they had a speakerphone. The speakerphone put the audio into the air, and microphones on the ceiling caught it and sent it to us. And yet, I didn't even notice really. We lost audio a few times during this lecture, and we only get a small number of colours during the slides here, which is a pity as this one is all about pretty pictures. And the VNC session (what we're using to see his screen) is running at one frame a second during its best moments. Which means that his videos suck instead of being cool. I'm hoping we'll be able to get a copy of his presentation so we can get the images at least. But the video of the speakers has been fantastic: we're getting around twelve frames a second, in sync with the audio, and things aren't quite smooth enough to make me comfortable but I haven't really noticed it.

They're blaming the audio problems on all the students arriving back on campus at Utah and plugging in their computers to boot up napster, so the local network is melting down.

There have been several veiled digs at the Bush Administration and how certain military actions and other diversions of funds have stilted research funding. It was pretty interesting to hear about the changes that have been wrought over the past four years.

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