BCNETwork News
 
December 2005

Q & A WITH BRIAN CORRIE, COLLABORATION & VISUALIZATION COORDINATOR FOR WESTGRID AND IRMACS, SIMON FRASER UNIVERSITY.   

BCNET recently sat down with Brian Corrie to learn more about how he is enabling scientists to instantaneously collaborate, interactively explore complex data sets and share scientific images of their data with colleagues around the world, all with the click of a button. This is being made possible today through a research project called Media Lightpaths.

Q: Tell us about how you are helping researchers.

A: Essentially, my role is to help support researchers to understand the benefits and use of collaboration and visualization technology. I work on behalf of WestGrid’s Collaboration and Visualization Group as well as Simon Fraser University to promote this innovative technology for research. I am also leading a research project to make collaboration and visualization easily accessible to researchers.

Q: What is Collaboration and Visualization Technology?

A: Scientific visualization is about looking at complex scientific data through imaging. The old saying of a picture tells 1000 words certainly applies to understanding scientific data. Often scientists will create a visualization of their data to understand what is going on. They might have a 3D visualization that has 2 molecular structures coming together to form a new enzyme or a new drug. And, they don’t want to look at a bunch of numbers; they want to actually see the image. As well as sharing these high bandwidth images, they need to collaborate interactively through video and audio with distant colleagues to help solve problems. WestGrid’s collaboration and visualization infrastructure has the necessary technologies to provide this capability.

Q:How will your research project enable easier collaboration?

A: The Media Lightpaths project is a CANARIE funded research project between a number of universities across Canada with a goal of providing opportunities for researchers to seamlessly and interactively collaborate using extremely high-bandwidth, low latency networks. We are designing software technology that will enable researchers to provision, use, and then tear-down gigabit scale networks for a short 2 hour meeting with the simple click of a button. The result is that they can push extremely high-bandwidth data across advanced networks for an instantaneous collaboration. Once the meeting is over the network resources are released for someone else to use. Essentially, we are configuring the network at the applications layer without the user having to know about or understand the complexities of the underlying network.

Q: Can you give us an example of how this will work?

A: Imagine if you were a molecular scientist at SFU and you needed to collaborate with another group at say Dalhousie University. Basically, these Media Lightpaths will allow anyone to set-up a direct high-bandwidth connection between sites by simply clicking a button. The research work we are doing is designing the middleware interface that sits between the high-level collaboration application and the lower-level network control infrastructure that CANARIE provides through its User Controlled Lightpath (UCLP) software, so that researchers have an easy and user friendly way to get extremely high bandwidth connections. In other words, they won’t need to use a network engineer to set-up this direct link, or even know anything about IP numbers. The beauty is that at the end of the meeting/collaboration the network comes down and can be utilized for other purposes.

Q: CANARIE currently promotes User Controlled Lightpaths, how are Media Lightpaths different?

A: Lightpaths are direct point-to-point channels or dedicated wave signals that can highly optimize network bandwidth for specialized research projects. CANARIE, through its partners, developed User Controlled Lightpath software that empowers network users to build private sub networks on their own. The problem is you need to have knowledge about end-points, switches, and port numbers to make this work. The Media Lightpath project takes this one step further by building the software interface that hides this complexity from the user. Anyone can use it --you don’t have to be an engineer. In fact, the user won’t be able to tell that they are using the advanced network except through the fact that the quality of the visualization and collaboration that they are experiencing are exceptionally high quality.

Q: When do you expect to have a working prototype?

A: We are targeting to have a test prototype completed by the first quarter of next year. By the end of the second quarter we should be able to demonstrate this capability to lightpath enabled sites on demand.

For more information about WestGrid and IRMACS Collaboration and Visualization Technology, visit the WestGrid and IRMACS websites. For more information about the Media Lightpath project, contact Brian Corrie

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