[AG-TECH] AG related Alliance Expedition Strategies

[Rick Stevens]

Hi All,

I have been thinking about proposing an Alliance Expedition to prototype
"Scientific Group Workspaces of the Future".  The goal of this expedition
will be to form a collaboration between technology developers and end
users to develop and deploy next generation collaborative and remote
visualization tools that meet the needs of specific science and education
projects in the context of the National Computational Science Alliance and
the NSF PACI program in general.  The idea is to build on the successful
widespread deployment of the Access Grid and to:

1.  Further develop the concept of Access Grid Virtual Venues to support 
Grid based access to domain oriented problem solving environments (e.g. 
Bioengineering, Neural Imaging and Simulation, Chemical Engineering, 
Nanoscience, and Computational Molecular Biology, Structural Biology, 
Systems Biology, Astronomy and Astrophysics, etc.).  This will require 
developing new ways to host "access portals" via the Access Grid and to 
develop collaborative interfaces to exsiting PSEs, workbenchs and tools.

2. Extend the concept of AG Virtual Venues to support access to
high-performance remote visualization services.  The idea here is to
enable Tiled Displays to become first class Access Grid nodes that can
exploit a Streaming Visualization related services component of future
Virtual Venues.  One way in which this could be used is to link Tiled
Display systems to one or more parallel visualization servers in the same
way that current Access Grid nodes are linked to each other via
audio/video Venue services.

3. Develop Virtual Venue services that can support collaborative group
oriented interfaces to instruments.  Targets here could include
microscopes, shake tables, APS beamlines, etc.  The group interfaces could
be used for collaborative research and for educational purposes.  A
variety of specific application/interface sharing modalities need to be
explored.  One idea would be to leverage ongoing work at ANL to build
"workspace docking"  capabilities targeting the on-demand integration of
personal workspaces with AG related group workspaces, enabling AG uses
to "bring their instrument to work".

4. Deploy a number of domain related resources to the community via
enhanced Virtual Venue services (e.g. persistent support for documents,
hosted and remote applications, databases, and other tools), and new AG
client applications including remote visualization clients for existing AG
nodes and AG enabled Tiled Displays.  The idea here would be to use the
new capabilities and services developed in this Expedition to deploy some
prototype domain resource Grids.  We would like to see these prototype
domain resource Grids being used to support ongoing research, education
and training.

If you are interested in participating in and/or discussing this
Expedition let me know.  We will be seeking out interested individuals and
groups at the Alliance All Hands Meeting this week to put together a
formal proposal.  The Alliance Expeditions are designed to connect
technology producers and technology consumers through innovative
collaborative projects.  Funding is likely to be limited to those that are
currently partners of the Alliance, however there is a provision for
self-funded collaborators to enable expeditions to include additional
groups outside of the current partnership community if they have their own
resources.

Cheers,

--Rick