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.
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:
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.