The ERDC Proposal is divided into multiple sub efforts for separate activities. Here I enclose the first two sub efforts and we need contract set up to allow other efforts to be added dynamically through the year.In 1999-2000, we had about 9 separate projects with ERDC. We will not have as many at FSU due to start up issues. The next set of projects will be ready by the end of February. Geoffrey Fox is Principal Investigator for this work. Start Date is I believe March 27 2000 I spoke to Henry Gabb at ERDC whom I think you spoke to. He expects to get your proposal; write a sole source justification and "hand to CSC Contracts" Please email me if any questions I will send ASC proposal soon Thank you I) Core Support Area: Collaboration and Communications Organization: Florida State University Core Technology Transfer: Florida State will provide a core level of effort to support technology transfer, user outreach, training, and assessment of tools and technologies to facilitate communication and collaboration among the PET team and users of the ERDC MSRC. Technologies of interest include, but are not limited to, both synchronous and asynchronous collaboration over the Internet and use of databases to manage large volumes of information, especially when coupled with web servers to facilitate access to the information. As a new area of interest, we propose adding handheld devices to this core support effort. Since the TangoInteractive collaboratory tool has been commercialized through the company WebWisdom.com, Florida State does not plan to provide technical support or further enhancements to the core system. However we will continue to use Tango Interactive and will assist PET partners with its use. Florida State will continue to operate and enhance web-linked database applications Syracuse developed for ERDC MSRC, and, as requested, assist with transfer to on-site computer systems. As in training, collaboration and communication is a somewhat confused state with the promise on Internet and Hand-held systems being clearly understood but rapidly improving commercial technology (and Internet infrastructure) makes it hard to recommend major investments. In the collaboration area, our work will be based on an analysis of TangoInteractive prepared as part of the year 4 work at Syracuse. This proposes a more modular approach rather than the complete system developed in TangoInteractive but keeping a broad architectural framework of collaborative portals. Florida State will maintain frequent contact with ERDC MSRC Webmaster, database administrators, and other on-site personnel to insure that C/C resources provide the maximum utility to the PET/user community. Florida State will also maintain regular contact with PET team members to assess needs. Florida State will select and attend focused conferences and other meetings that have high payoff and direct application for team and user interaction and technology transfer. Handheld Core Effort Handheld/wearable digital devices and the associated wireless communications infrastructures are a rapidly growing and very interesting area of computing technology. With the potential to link to the Internet and the Grid, as well as to specialized sensors and instrumentation, these tools create many new opportunities. Although we will propose focused efforts for specific projects in this area, it has become clear that a general technology tracking effort is necessary in order to help understand the capabilities of the numerous new devices which are appearing on the market, the role of industry efforts such as WAP (wireless application protocol) and Bluetooth, and the general directions of the market. This will give us a better capability to take advantage of "commodity" devices and standards, while also helping to understand where they might not meet the needs of "handheld high performance computing" (hHPC), which is in many respects NOT a commodity application of these devices. As part of this tracking effort, we will o Follow, and at appropriate times analyze, industry standards/initiatives (i.e. WAP, Bluetooth) in the context of hHPC o Track the actual availability of new devices and new capabilities which may be important for hHPC o Where appropriate, acquire and analyze devices to obtain a more detailed understanding of their potential in hHPC o Maintain a web site at FSU where the results of this tracking will be made available We also propose to organize a workshop at FSU "Hand-Held Supercomputing" which will bring together representatives of industry, academia, and HPC communities (detailed description at the end of this proposal). Collaboration Core Effort Our strategy is similar to that for training; namely to combine a user requirement analysis, lessons from the previous work and a survey of available tools where we will concentrate on a modules including audio- video conferencing, shared presentation and editing and brainstorming tools. We will include "inhouse" technology (TangoInteractive) as well as other commercial and academic efforts. In the critical audio-video conferencing arena we will include BuenaVista (From TangoInteractive), CUSeeMe, Access Grid (Argonne/NCSA), NetMeeting and the emerging Internet Phones. The analysis will be in the architectural context of a "Collaborative Portal" We will use our past experience (where TangoInteractive only had limited acceptance outside training) to design a requirements analysis covering training, computer users and MSRC staff. We will present preliminary reports at mid year and use these to design some experimental deployment efforts in the last half of the year. Deliverables: o Trip reports for conferences and user contacts (as appropriate) o Contributions to PET biweekly reports and presentations at periodic review meetings (as conducted) o Contribute materials pertaining to collaboration and communication technologies to the ERDC MRSC PET C/C web site (on-going) o Report on selected collaboration tools and their possible roles within the ERDC MSRC and PET organizations (Sept'00) o Selected experimental deployment of identified collaboration tools o Report on selected handheld devices and their role in training and high performance computing o Tutorial on Handheld devices at time to be agreed Required Resources: $97,765 Item Base Fringe Overhead Total Geoffrey Fox 7,500 1,380 4,129 13,009 David Bernholdt 8,279 1,523 4,558 14,360 Graduate Student 16,000 96 7,485 23,581 Tuition 2,000 - - 2,000 Undergraduate 2,000 12 936 2,948 Travel 3,078 - 1,431 4,509 Handheld devices 7,500 - 3,488 10,988 Handheld Super. Wkshp. 18,000 - 8,370 26,370 TOTAL 97,765 Travel includes: DoD HPC UGC (2 people, split with C/C and with other PET programs) ERDC MSRC (2 people, 2 reviews, split with C/C) ---------- Proposed Workshop "Hand-Held Supercomputing" Vision: Personal digital assistants, digital appliances, E-books, wearable computers, wireless networking, and emerging software infrastructures represent some of the technologies that are likely to form part of the commonplace interface to a variety of computing environments. The convergence of these technologies with the Grid - the evolving information architecture integrating computing, data exploration, large databases, and remote instrumentation - creates many new opportunities including ubiquitous access to the nation's high performance computing infrastructure. This workshop will bring together people from the HPC community to exchange information about this future. SC2000 will host a technology demonstration eSCape 2000 to explore this vision of computing and information access anticipated in the 21st century. This is one but not the only example of this vision. Date: Wed-Thur, July 12-13, 2000 Place: CSIT (School of Computational Science and Information Technology) conference room, FSU campus, Tallahassee, FL Times: Wed 9 AM - 5 PM, Thursday 9 AM - 3 PM (allows for flights home that evening) Wednesday evening: a catered dinner at CSIT, followed by a panel discussion of burning issues Advertise to DOD, PACI, DOE, industry(somehow), and SC2000 communities Deadlines: paper submissions May 1 paper acceptances May 15 program announcement June 1 Program would be approximately 18 submitted talks (30 min) and 4 invited talks (45 min) We will establish at CSIT a conference Email address Conference Organizing Committee: Fox, Duke, West, Jones, Gordon Erlebacher (CSIT) and Kyle Gallivan (CSIT) Conference Program Committee: Fox, Duke, Turcotte, Wallach, Dan Reed, Gordon Erlebacher (CSIT) and Ted Baker (CS FSU) 2-3 others Industry participation: Palm, SUN, Nokia (via Wallach), IBM, Lucent, Cisco (via SCInet) need to coordinate (to some degree) with SCInet 2000 Budget: $10,000 to support food, etc for all attendees - we assume 50 (assuming no conference fees) $8,000 to support four invited speakers Remaining open questions: 1. Tutorial(s) on Tues July 11 ? (Might generate too much interest!) 2. Technology demos on Wed night or during one or both afternoons? --------------------------------------------------------------------- II) Core Support Area: Training Core Technology Tracking and Transfer: Florida State will provide a core level of effort to support technology transfer, user outreach, and long-range leadership on issues of technology, tools, and techniques related to PET Training and Educational needs. Technologies of interest include, but are not limited to, synchronous and asynchronous web/Internet-based distance education tools, electronic repositories of training materials, etc. The current situation is a mixture of clarity and confusion. There is general agreement that the web-based approach (where PET has been a leading player) will dominate and for instance lead to major changes in the enterprise model for education and training. However the current Internet hardware infrastructure and software models are changing rapidly. Further the richness of base capabilities implies that no one vendor or research group can supply "complete" solutions -- rather one must expect to construct systems from modules from multiple sources. This should be built on our experiences (especially with Tango) and maintain successes of current program. For education side, the experiments between Syracuse, Jackson State, and other HBCU's has showed clearly that training technology can help DoD encourage the minority student pipeline. We need technology to further encourage the HBCU network associated with PET. For training, we need to better understand the relative role of asynchronous versus synchronous instruction and provide tools to smoothly integrate computing exercises. The shift to Florida State where Fox has a State supported research effort in distance education brings new resources -- especially understanding of asynchronous tools Blackboard and Web-MC. We propose to work closely with the on-site Training team at the ERDC MSRC (Dr. Wayne Mastin and John Eberle) to understand the needs and use of training technology at the MSRC in the context of the changing technology base. This requirement analysis will be complemented by a survey of current and emerging tools which we will classify in terms of the concept of a "collaborative portal" which will underlie our research efforts at Florida State and capture the lessons from the PET and other efforts funded at Syracuse over the last few years. A technology of clear importance is XML to either describe Mathematics or Graphics or to define the overall component structure of a portal. We will recommend tools and standards that will enable authoring of training material that can best be re-used as the underlying technology base shifts. We will complete an initial survey by the mid-year review and document with reports and presentations. We will select and support some key tools for user experimentation and evaluation in the second half of year5. Florida State will continue to select and attend focused conferences and other meetings that have high payoff and contribute directly to providing leadership on training technology issues. We expect this effort to position the MSRC to be able to make innovative use of emerging training technology and standards and continue its leadership position in year 6 and beyond. User Outreach: We will conduct a specialized requirements analysis basing survey on capabilities of common tools such as Syracuse's VPL (Virtual Programming Laboratory) for computing instruction, WebCT and PowerPoint for authoring, TangoInteractive for synchronous Instruction, Blackboard for database support. We will analyze these in the collaborative portal concept using common Web Information Portals as an initial motivator. We will cover both MSRC and HBCU users. Training: As part of our effort to support the use of distance training tools within the PET program, we plan to offer a Distance Training Workshop covering approaches for both synchronous and asynchronous modes of delivery. We will include a tutorial on base technologies -- especially XML covering the use of the Object web in all areas of relevance to the MSRC. We will include those tools selected as part of mid year report. Deliverables: o Trip reports for conferences and user contacts (as appropriate) o Contributions to PET biweekly reports and presentations at periodic review meetings (as conducted) o Contribute materials pertaining to education and training technologies to the ERDC MRSC PET Training web site (on-going) o Involvement in PET Program-Wide Training Group meetings and activities (as conducted) o Report evaluating training and education tools linked to both MSRC user and HBCU pipeline requirements o Support of selected tools such as XML Portal construction and database systems as well VPL (or better) programming interface. o Hosting of TangoInteractive Servers as needed by MSRC training and education Required Resources: $70,677 Item Base Fringe Overhead Total Geoffrey Fox 7,500 1,380 4,129 13,009 David Bernholdt 8,279 1,523 4,558 14,360 Graduate Student 16,000 96 7,485 23,581 Tuition 2,000 - - 2,000 Undergraduate 2,000 12 936 2,948 Travel 3,078 - 1,431 4,509 Software (for eval.) 3,000 - 1,395 4,395 Dist. Training Wkshp 4,010 - 1,865 5,875 TOTAL 70,677 Travel includes: DoD HPC UGC (2 people, split with C/C and with other PET programs) ERDC MSRC (2 people, 2 reviews, split with C/C)