The LHC and other high energy physics (HEP) programmes face unprecedented challenges in their need for scientists located at sites around the world to work collaboratively on data analysis and other activities during the construction, commissioning and operation of their experiments. Physicists throughout the world may be separated from the experimental site, and from their colleagues, by up to 12 time zones. For the last 10 years the web-based Virtual Room Videoconferencing System (VRVS) has been a mainstay for remote collaboration throughout the HEP community, but this is about to change as VRVS is replaced by the next-generation system, Enabling Virtual Organizations (EVO).
Virtual room videoconferencing
VRVS first went into production in 1997. It was developed and managed by Caltech and its partners; funded by the US Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation; and has been supported by CERN's IT department.
Since its introduction the system has provided a cost-effective global collaboration service for the HEP community. Until recently VRVS was unique in its overall scalability and its ability to support real-time collaborative sessions across a variety of working environments, including individuals using desktops, laptops or mobile devices; work groups in small or medium-sized conference rooms; teams in control rooms; and large groups in auditoria.
The VRVS user community has grown exponentially, by approximately a factor of two each year for the last 10 years, and now includes users in 130 countries. VRVS has thus become a standard part of the toolset used daily by a large sector of HEP, and is used increasingly by other programmes.
VRVS has met the milestones and expectations of its original development and deployment plan, and is widely recognized worldwide as a useful and efficient collaboration facility. However, as it was used on a bigger scale the VRVS system began to show its limitations, especially during recent large meetings involving many sites.
Introducing EVO
EVO was officially released in June 2007, and it represents a major step forward in providing the HEP community with a more effective collaborative system. It has greater functionality, scalability and robustness, including resistance to network and end-system problems. One key change is that the collaboration infrastructure has been partially automated by deploying a set of intelligent software agents in every element of the system, including the end-users' computers and the networks interconnecting them. The software is based on Caltech's MonALISA system (Monitoring Agents in a Large Integrated Services Architecture. See http://monalisa.caltech.edu). This change has transformed the collaboration service offered to the physics community into a resilient, adaptive global system.
Compared with VRVS, EVO includes a better integrated and more convenient user interface, it has a richer set of features with higher resolution video and instant messaging, it is more adaptable to all platforms and operating systems, and overall is more efficient and robust.
All of these aspects are particularly important as we approach and then enter the start-up period of the LHC, because the community will engage in an unprecedented level of daily collaboration. There will be intense demand for long-distance scheduled meetings, person-to-person communication, group-to-group discussions, broadcast meetings, workshops, and continuous presence at important locations such as control rooms and experimental areas. It will be crucial that the collaboration tools are totally integrated into the physicists' working environment. EVO and its future upgrades are designed to provide a cost-effective system that will continue to scale and adapt to the current technologies, and meet the demands of the community in the LHC era with a relatively modest level of manpower dedicated to operations and support.
A unique collaboration system
EVO provides a unique, unified collaboration system for both the LHC community and the physics community at large. It integrates several widely used video and audio technologies. Through a series of developments capitalizing on the team's 12 years of accumulated experience and expertise, the system now includes advanced visual features that provide a unique level of high resolution, interactivity, and information management during working meetings that are not available elsewhere.
On EVO systems running Windows – and soon the other major operating systems as well – the live videos and portions of the users' desktops are embedded in an OpenGL graphics window where they "live" in a three-dimensional space. This enables a collaborative session to be viewed on a conventional desktop or projected, and also to be viewed in 3D, permitting a large amount of streamed and static information to be "stored" and presented as needed. A large virtual space is available on a normal desktop screen and this can be projected in medium and large rooms.
As mass-market display screens and graphics card technologies advance, the amount and richness of the information that can be handled at low cost in these sessions will continue to increase. At the moment a typical desktop set-up might include a PC with a 30 inch display with 4 million pixels for a few thousand dollars, or a large plasma display for workgroup meetings, or a high-resolution projector for large meetings.
At the other end of the scale, users can also access EVO meetings using the standard, non-digital telephone system (POTS) through gateways, the first of which have been installed at CERN and Caltech. Gateways at other HEP labs and universities are planned and will be added as the service is scaled up. This will enable a user to simply call one of the gateways closest to his/her location and save the cost of the call. Users can also access and connect to an EVO meeting via an H.323 endpoint or a multiple control unit, such as the ESnet system or Lyon's HERMES system, for example. EVO also supports the session initiation protocol (SIP), which is the main VoIP protocol deployed today in industry.
Key features
The main basic features of EVO include: support for the three main operating systems (Windows, Linux and MacOS); IPv6 and Multicast integration; playback and recording functions; a shared-files function; whiteboard; and a Poll/Vote function.
Application programming interfaces will be provided soon for external development/integration, such as Indico (in progress), Shibboleth authentication (done), and Grid EE certificates (in progress). In this way users will be able to access the EVO service with a single sign on by simply using their institute or collaboration login.
The team is now encouraging VRVS users to move to EVO as soon as possible, as the support for EVO exclusively will begin in December. More information on EVO, its many features and functions, and how to get started, can be found at http://evo.caltech.edu. Questions and comments are welcomed by the EVO team, and can be sent to evosupport@vrvs.org.