Focused Effort Title: Audio Video Conferencing System Evaluation Organization: Florida State University Thematic Area(s): HPC Training and DoD User Productivity Lead: Geoffrey Fox/David Bernholdt Email Address: gcf@cs.fsu.edu/bernhold@npac.syr.edu Telephone: 315 443 3857 Fax: 315 443 1973 Statement of Work: Clearly a major issue in enabling effective collaboration is the need for some sort of audio-video conferencing. Experience has shown that this presents many challenges including the most obvious problem of lack of quality of service on today's Internet. This can lead to "break-up" in the audio to which the ear is very sensitive. Another important issue is the lack of "bonding" between instructor and students as illustrated by low level of interactivity in some but not all Tango classes. Perhaps a richer video collaborative environment can help the latter. As today we do not really make use of the rapidly improving bandwidth on the Internet in systems like TangoInteractive, it makes sense to ask if we can this resource to improve interactivity. As part of our basic core effort in C/C, we intend to look again at commercial desktop conferencing. However in this FE, we intend to install and test the Access Grid system developed by Argonne National Laboratory and deployed widely in the NCSA Alliance. This system will be first installed and evaluated at FSU in first half of year 5. In the following 6 months, we will if the evaluation is positive support installation at other DoD and PET partner sites. Note this is consistent with a slightly less ambitious approach to collaboration than in TangoInteractive. The latter was a fully and elegantly integrated system. Here we use a modular but ad-hoc system of linking together tools from multiple sources without initially an attempt to integrate with a single session management. The latter will be necessary presumably for eventual widespread deployment but does not seem to be a requirement for PET and HPCMO use. The Access Grid is fully described in http://www-fp.mcs.anl.gov/fl/Accessgrid/ag-technical.htm with hardware listed and costed at http://www-fp.mcs.anl.gov/fl/Accessgrid/downloads/text_html_excel/agnode-list.xls We budget for this FE rather less hardware than in this spreadsheet, as we will use the Powerwall display at FSU. The audio and control(PC/Network) purchases cost $33K with one projector for testing outside Powerwall. We budget one full student for this 6 months and travel to Argonne to learn the ropes Deliverables o 6 months: Working Access Grid Node at FSU tested and evaluated to other NCSA Alliance Sites o 6 Months: Evaluation of Access Grid for HPCMO Management and training with comparison to desktop systems. o Presentations for PET Midyear and Annual Reviews o Inputs to PET Annual Report o Written progress reports in June and December 2000 Required Resources: $21,615 Item Base Fringe Overhead Total David Bernholdt 2,547 469 1,402 4,418 0.5 Graduate Student 8,000 48 3,742 11,790 Tuition 1,000 - - 1,000 Travel 3,008 - 1,399 4,407 TOTAL 21,615 Travel includes two trips to Argonne National Lab