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Caltech's VRVS Project Extends Its Research Collaboration

I2-News

10.15.2004

Worldwide: The VRVS team will collaborate with Research and Education networks and major research projects around the globe to provide the academic community with a unique and reliable real-time infrastructure supporting all protocols for advanced collaboration.

Pasadena, California, October 15, 2004: In response to strong demand, the VRVS team will extend their research collaboration and service offerings beyond High Energy and Nuclear Physics, to other research and academic communities. The VRVS Project will offer each of its partners (initially all the National and Education Networks or very large scientific research projects) a dedicated "Community" of virtual rooms hosted in the VRVS Web server, in exchange for appointing a designated full time administrator working on behalf of the partner's field.

The VRVS (Virtual Room Videoconferencing System) is a unique, globally scalable next-generation system for real-time collaboration by small workgroups, medium and large teams engaged in research, education and outreach. VRVS operates over an ensemble of national and international networks. The system was initially built as a prototype-production system serving the high energy and nuclear physics (HENP) community and some other data-intensive science and engineering sectors. Since its first deployment in 1997, its functions and features have been continually enhanced, and its scalability has been upgraded substantially through use of the latest system architectures. VRVS now provides the global collaboration infrastructure and Web-enabled user interfaces required to meet the research and education needs of many fields. It covers the full range of existing and emerging network protocols, and the full range of client devices for collaboration, from mobile systems through desktops to installations in large auditoria.

Today, around 12,000 users have been registered on the system. An average of 800 worldwide collaborative sessions are performed every month, involving more than 3000 users and representing a cumulative time of 4700 hours of research collaboration over the Internet. The VRVS infrastructure is currently deployed on 82 reflectors (Linux servers) that manage, optimize and direct the traffic VRVS media streams worldwide. VRVS supports users on Windows, Macintosh and Linux platforms. It is entirely web-based, so very user-friendly. It has a scheduler for organizing collaboration meetings but can also create permanent virtual rooms. It supports all the common standards (H.323, Mbone and SIP). It is developed in partnership with Grid projects and integrated the latest Grid monitoring software into the VRVS infrastructure.

The planned large-scale deployment and expanded set of partnerships will provide us with critical data on the scalability and adaptability of the system to diverse working environments. We will use this data and experience to drive the design and development of our next generation Grid-enabled Collaborative System. This system, whose goals include global scalability, agent-based self-monitoring of operations, enhanced security and end-to-end real time performance optimization, will be deployed in the near future.

The VRVS team will continue to work closely with our current national research and education network partners: Internet2 (U.S.; via the Internet2 Commons), REDIRIS (Spain), RNP (Brazil), REUNA (Chile), RENATER (France), SANET (Slovakia), INFN (Italy), and FUNET (Finland), while we add additional partners to the list.

For more information visit http://www.vrvs.org or send an email to contact@vrvs.org