SURA: IT Initiatives:
Emerging Application & Collaboration Technologies

Conferences and Workshops | Advanced Applications

Conferences & Workshops
In 1997, the National Science Foundation revised the original Supercomputer Centers program to create the Partnerships for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (PACI). Two leading edge sites were identified (NPACI & NCSA) and SURA was invited to participate in the new program as a member of the National Computational Science Alliance's (NCSA) Partnership for Advanced Computational Services (PACS). The program's objectives, to help disseminate and support technologies developed by Alliance teams, to coordinate Alliance resources and services to users, to aid in Grid deployment and to provide outreach to the research community, meshed well with the SURA mission.

SURA's participation evolved into a series of meetings and workshops' which formed an important link to member research communities for the dissemination of information and deployment of technologies and to encourage collaborations and specific advanced network applications development within the SURA footprint as well as national and international interaction.

Workshop topics include those which have evolved into annual events, like the Video Development Initiative (ViDe) and the Computational Chemistry Conferences, and those addressing issues of immediate and specific interest to the research community, like the programs providing details on new Federal funding for National Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) and briefings on "Innovations in Science, Computing and Grid Technology.

2004 will be the final year of the 5 year NSF PACS program and of the current workshop program. There are several workshop topics under consideration for 2004 to continue the SURA experience of providing IT information, awareness and technical assistance to the research community.

For the most recent and upcoming SURA IT workshops and conferences, see the SURA events calendar. In addition, some workshop highlights are noted below.

Middleware Workshop on Enterprise Directory Services - 2003
The SURA workshop program regularly seeks to complement and build upon other SURA activities. In 2003, SURA's involvement in the NSF Middleware Initiative (NMI) spawned an effort to support extended deployment of "ripened " NMI middleware components. NMI Integration Testbed sites and members of the NMI Outreach team worked with SURA to develop and trial a small group training course designed to educate and train IT staff for enterprise directory deployment. Two workshops were conducted for representatives of the AN-MSI project (Advanced Networking - Minority Serving Institutions) and the Council of Independent Colleges. These workshops served to educate participants and also to refine and position the syllabus and approach for replications by and for other institutions. Future dissemination and development of these workshops is anticipated and under consideration.

Workshop series on Computational Chemistry - 2001 through the present
The Computational Chemistry Grid Conference series commenced in October 2001, accessed by 10 remote sites including institutions in Finland, England and throughout the US. Remote participation was enabled through technology development that had been actively promoted through an earlier SURA project to catalyze the development ofa "gateway" that could bridge disparate IP-based video conferencing technologies. VRVS software was used to bridge VRVS, H.323 and ACCESS Grid users into the same event. The Computational Chemistry Conference brings together distributed worldwide experts in a highly specialized topic; its success in this is directly attributable to evolution and use of the video gateway technology.

These annual workshops continue to emphasize the development and the use of computational techniques in chemistry and material science for the new generation of terascale computers. A key feature has been to provide a bridge between various Internet protocols that are being used to share information on developments and applications of quantum mechanics and molecular dynamics.

An important by product has been to expand the number and location of remote sites in order to demonstrate the effectiveness of the combined technologies Access Grid and VRVS to support distance-learning objectives. The program has included presentations by remote panelists located in the US as well as Europe. On-going support from the Army Research Laboratory (ARL) has focused, this year on support for students from Minority Serving Institutions (MSI).

SURA ViDe Digital Video Workshop -
1998 through the present
The Video Development Initiative emerged from a SURA applications workshop in March 1998 when a group convened a lunch time session to discuss the video activities being demonstrated in the program. Four SURA institutions, Georgia Institute of Technology, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and North Carolina State University, took the lead in creating a project, partnering with the New York State Educational and Research Network (NYSERNet) shortly thereafter.

The initial ViDe project was funded by SURA. In this, ViDe created a "cookbook" for video conferencing deployment. This effort has been very successful with the fourth version being published in October 2003 along with a first translation into Spanish. A white paper on the state of the art of Video-On-Demand technology was also developed which provided a practical approach to evaluating the offerings of the video equipment vendors. Both documents have become significant reference works for any institution seeking information about using and supporting digital video within higher education.

The annual SURA ViDe Digital Video workshop is designed to serve the needs of both the end user and technical support staff and covers a wide range of topics. Surveys of ViDe workshop attendees overwhelmingly recommend the continuation of these programs and workshop is also achieving self-sufficiency financially even as the underlying support for this from the PACS program is reaching an end.

Advanced Network Application, Health Sciences, Biogrid workshops - 1999, 2000, 2003
The Advanced Network Applications Workshop held at UAB in 1999, keynoted by Dr. Michael Ackerman, Assistant Director, HPCC National Library of Medicine, featured his presentation on Federal support for applications and the impact of technology on the medical field. This served as the catalyst for a three-day workshop focused on the Health and Life Sciences and uses of the Internet2 in 2000. The extensive program featured key administrators from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and presentations on biotechnology, biomedicine and telemedicine.

The more than 30 papers presented also provided a glimpse of the range of funded projects on SURA member campuses. As Grids were evolving, with some states were making significant commitments to supporting Bioinformatics Grids, it was determined that SURA's follow-up workshop should address the importance of grids to support biological research. The BioGrid workshop, held in Raleigh Durham, January 2003 was the first effort to consider a SURA wide grid to provide the computing and data storage capabilities needed to support the demands of the burgeoning genomics revolution.