Lukasz Beca, Gang Cheng, Geoffrey C. Fox, Tomasz Jurga, Konrad Olszewski, Marek Podgorny, Piotr Sokolowski, and Krzysztof Walczak

NPAC Syracuse University

gcf@npac.syr.edu

TANGO Resource: http://www.npac.syr.edu/tango

TANGO and its current Applications: http://trurl.npac.syr.edu/tango/papers/tango_long.html

TANGO is a web-based collaborative environment originally developed for command and control or crisis management as either a direct implementation or as a simulation. We have since produced several educational applications and explored its use in Telemedicine and related Health care applications. We have more superficially looked at its applicability to other areas including collaborative design (engineers sharing simulations and design tools) and computational steering. In this talk, we describe a major redesign that we intend over the next three months and speculate on its use in multidisciplinary applications.

NPAC's approach to Web technologies is typically "bottom-up". We take technologies from the broad market and see how to enhance them for particular areas such as scientific computing and HPCC. This approach allows us to take full advantage of the rich and productive software produced for the consumer market and use these to produce programming environments that are typically much richer than those associated with the classic rather "bare-bones" HPCC system. For the TANGO redesign, we have reviewed many current commercial products, as we believe that to be successful, one must "buy a place at the table" by starting with a system that is competitive with products aimed at the general market. With such a base design, we then intend to focus TANGO development on particular applications (such as those mentioned above) by adding custom features. We expect that as we have developed the base integration infrastructure we will find that such enhanced application specific TANGO systems will outperform approaches that add-on to existing commercial products. The new TANGO will feature a simplified user interface, a built-in database that will for instance store feature and user information for multiple pre-configured rooms. The base TANGO capabilities will remain as Chat-room, White-board, and audio-video conferencing. Its use in education and training is described in http://www.npac.syr.edu/users/gcf/wisewords/webwisdom2.html.

The heart of a web collaboration system is one or more Java Servers, which support the integration and sharing of multiple server or client applications. One of TANGO's strengths is that these applications include client side programs in essentially any form -- we have already used C++, Java Applets and JavaScript. The base server network gives one access to the many services supported by the Web including server side simulations, databases (through JDBC) and object brokers as well as the rich information available through the Web. The client integration given by TANGO allows us to naturally link in multiple computational scientists with a variety of visualization devices. In the latter case, the new Java3D standard appears to offer an exciting opportunity to support uniformly both high-end (e.g. CAVE) and low-end PC systems. Another important recent development is the move to an "object-web" with the integration of Corba (and the Microsoft DCOM) into both Java and Web systems. This is particularly interesting for the distributed simulation world as it supports their move from the DIS to HLA standard.

We suggest that such multiple client-multiple server integration is an essential feature needed by multidisciplinary applications. We illustrate this by discussing the capabilities identified by the Industry study of the ASOP system discussed in my first talk. (http://www.npac.syr.edu/users/gcf/ASOPreport/ASOPRQD2.html ). This essentially needs engineers around the world linking to shared design systems, databases, multiple simulations and visualization systems. Note that TANGO is a framework and not a complete solution. Probably support for the detailed scheduling and HPCC capabilities of metacomputing needs to be added as do custom modules to share collaborative versions of design systems such as AUTOCAD and CATIA. However this is what we expect. TANGO is a generic integration technology that also provides a few key base collaboration capabilities. Any particular application area needs customization of special features.