Portal Infrastructure for Education and Computing from Palm to Desktop 

As part of the Alliance Portal activity, we have rethought our approach to
portals to include lessons from previous work by us and others. We intend
prototypes of several aspects of this in september and integrated functional
systems by december 00. This system will be tested on EOT activities and on
several computational applications including the Chemistry Engineering AT
team selected by the Alliance as the initial testbed. The details of these
deployment projects will depend somewhat on success/failure of proposals.
The Alliance work benefits from DoD HPCMO funding of related work.
We note that our move to Florida State University inevitably disrupted our work this year
but this will be complete by July 2000. FSU will have a large IBM SP system (0.25 teraflops
with a factor of 10 enhancements funded over next 2 years) and will install appropriate
wireless and information information infrastructure in the School of Computational Science
and Information Infrastructure (CSIT). FSU is strong in Scientific Visualization and in
large scale simulations such as ocean, weather and QCD. We have assembled a good team
for this work with a dozen PhD graduate students working in the general area of portals.
Summary of our ideas can be found in:
http://www.new-npac.org/users/fox/documents/generalportalmay00/erdcportal.html
http://www.new-npac.org/users/fox/documents/collabcompmay00/collabviz.html (has detailed
critique of collaboration approaches)
http://www.new-npac.org/users/fox/documents/wapmay00/wap-assessment.html (Appendix B)

Essential features of our approach are
1) Use of a "personal server" whose interfaces are defined in portalML and define user
   view of system. This controls user customization, layout etc,
2) The personal server(s) communicate with conventional middle tier where "resourceML"
   (as defined by IMS/ADL SCORM for education and Grid Forum for computing) defines objects
3) Personal server includes much of the code that we put in browser for our older systems
   Tango and Gateway. The new architecture produces a more robust system and makes it easier to drive
   different client side renderings (desktop, palmtop or Cave (PowerWall at FSU)) from
   a common server with essential logic
4) A federated (client and server side) XML-based event system with backend database store
   supporting both asynchronous access and synchronous multicast of events between clients. 
   This leads to robust support of synchronous and asynchronous colaboration.
5) Designed to allow integration of outside modules such as Access Grid or RealNetwork
   audio-video conferencing technology.

Deliverables are
December 00: Initial component prototypes including proposal for portalML
March 01: Initial System demonstrations on computing application including support of 
             hand held devices, and new collaborative capability built around the
             federated event infrastructure. The Access Grid will be used for conferencing
June 01:     Integrated system supporting chosen EOT and AT team applications.