NAVO PET Academic Affiliates Quarterly Report Syracuse University 2nd Quarter '99
Project Title: TANGO
Principal Investigator: Geoffrey Fox
Other Project Personnel: David Bernholdt, Marek Podgorny, Tango Interactive Collaboratory Group
Accomplishments This Quarter
Earlier in this contract year, we provided training on the Tango Interactive colaboratory system at NAVO and at Jackson State University (attended by Tennessee State U staff). We also assisted Morgan State U with their Tango installation.
During this quarter, Morgan State U began using their Tango installation to receive a class presented by Jackson State University, for which NPAC has provided technical support. NPAC also offered a computational science class to all PET partner institutions, and has been delivering it to students at Mississippi State U, Jackson State U, and Clark-Atlanta U since January.
Also during January was the culmination of the joint NPAC-Ohio Supercomputer Center prototype distance training. This experiment involved all four MSRCs, including NAVO, NRL-DC, and OSC training rooms receiving a class on OpenMP on the SGI broadcast using Tango.
Substantial progress has also been made on the core Tango Interactive collaboratory system. The BuenaVista audio/video conferencing system has been largely rewritten to increase its robustness, and a number of other bugs have been identified and fixed. An important maintenance update (version 1.4) with many of these fixes is about to be distributed to all Tango sites. The release of version 2.0, which includes significant enhancements of functionality, is currently planned for April.
Publications
none
Presentations
none
Problems
We continue to be quite frustrated by the lack of action on proposals SOLICITED BY THE NAVO PET MANAGEMENT some months ago. This frustration arises because of the general feeling that we could be doing far more for the NAVO PET program than is supported by our current "baseline" level of funding.
Our frustration is heightened by the fact that this incident has placed a significant financial burden on NPAC. In soliciting the mid-year proposals, the Management stressed the importance of having significant deliverables by the end of the contract year. In December, when we must make offers to graduate students for Spring term assistantships, we still had no firm information about the proposals, but encouraging signs. We were forced to choose whether or not to hire students for some of these projects, without which we would be unable to deliver according to the proposal. On the strength of the Management's solicitation of these proposals in the first place, and subsequent encouraging information, we went in NAVO's favor and hired several students, who we now have to support from other sources.
