Name of Award: Technology R&D projects

Laboratory Partners: ANL, LANL, LBNL, PNNL, ORNL, and SNL

Amount of Award: $9,000,000 (1 to 3 years)

Science Area: Design and build the next generation of tools and technology to support the National Collaboratory and the Advanced Computational Testing and Simulation elements of the DOE 2000 Initiative.

DOE/ER Programs: CTR-MICS

Number of Researchers: 14

Potential for New Knowledge: Seven projects provide the most critical collaborative tools for DOE applications.

Collaboration Management: ANL and PNNL will develop a real-time collaboration framework to integrate existing, but incompatible collaboration tools. The framework will allow tools such as video conferencing, editors, problem solving environments and remote instrumentation to be integrated in a Òsession.Ó Two user interfaces will be developed: a spatially-based interaction manager and a session-based collaboration manager based on the conference manager metaphor. Both will be implemented with Java and will incorporate tools such as the Mbone suite and shared Web-browsing. The basic framework and the mechanisms to add tools will be available to the other R&D projects and the pilots as soon as possible.

Collaboratory Integration Framework: ANL, LBNL, PNNL and SNL will focus on producing the distributed computing software bus required to support the development of scientific collaboratories and will provide coordination for the integration of the tools from the other R&D projects. A significant piece of the infrastructure will be a common communication library which includes both multicast and unicast with various levels of reliability and ordering capabilities.

Electronic Logbooks: LBNL, PNNL, and ORNL will develop a modular, extensible, notebook framework and use it to produce cross-platform interoperating prototype implementations based on modern object oriented design. The basic notebooks and the mechanism to add support for new data types in the notebook will be made available to the pilots as an early milestone.

ESnet Quality of Service: LBNL will write a bandwidth broker application which will become part of the administrative hierarchy which manipulates the bandwidth allocation machinery to provide sustained bandwidth to an application.

Floor Control: LBNL will integrate mechanisms for floor control into the Mbone tool architecture so that it is possible to have moderated meetings when video conferencing. The module will plug into existing protocol support and provide the standard Mbone tools with scaleable floor control.

Scaleable Security Architecture: LBNL will define and demonstrate a general and modular security architecture that will address the goal of protecting open network applications and provide flexible interfaces to enable cross-platform, cross-component implementation of the architecture and security functions. Pilots will be established to demonstrate the architecture in operational environments.

Shared Virtual Spaces: ANL will address the existing barriers to deploying shared VR spaces for the output of simulations and rendering of experimental data. Interoperability problems will be addressed a) to allow the archiving of collaborative sessions and the integration of network audio and video conferencing tools into the shared collaborative environment and b) to develop custom graphics format converters for DOE scientific applications.