Collaborative Tools

Multi-participant visualization is especially useful where large data and the visualization/rendering infrastructure is centrally located, and multiple remote participants are actively involved in investigation. One of our fusion stakeholders - D. Schissel of General Atomics - has specifically requested remote, collaborative visualization capability. In that project, experimental data is analyzed by multiple geographically dispersed participants. The resulting analysis is used to adjust the experimental device for the next experiment. This cycle needs to be conducted quickly due to the limited amount of time between experiments and the need to adjust the next experiment in response to analysis of data from the previous experiment. Our approach for deploying remote collaborative visualization will emphasize generality and practicality for production use: we want to support remote and collaborative visualization using the broadest possible set of visualization applications and on the broadest possible set of client-side platforms. To accomplish this, our Center will adapt and deploy a technology known as "Chromium RenderServer" (CRRS) that is currently being developed under DOE's Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) program. CRRS is very similar to the popular desktop-sharing tool known as VNC: a user launches a thin client application to gain access to a virtual desktop on some remotely located computer. The user has a complete desktop on the remote machine; any applications run on the remote machine appear within the virtual desktop on the client-side machine. The user interacts with those applications as if they were sitting at the console of the remote machine. CRRS provides key capabilities needed to support remote visualization that are not provided by traditional VNC both in terms of scalable hardware accelerated rendering capabilities and collaborative interaction access via secure infrastructure. Our Center will adapt and deploy Chromium RenderServer at NERSC and NLCF will provide the ability for remotely located researchers to enjoy the benefit of parallel, hardware accelerated visualization applications in a collaborative visualization context.