Built entirely from off-the-shelf components, RAGE takes video conferencing where it has never gone before.

For the second year in a row, a Berkeley Lab-led team took top honors in a contest to move the most data across the network built around SC, the annual conference of high-performance computing and networking. Meanwhile, the Lab's Remote Access Grid Entity (RAGE) robot was rolling around the conference floor, demonstrating the next generation of video conferencing technology.

SC2001, held in Denver, marked the second staging of the Network Bandwidth Challenge, in which researchers with high-bandwidth applications using huge amounts of distributed data were invited to push SCinet, the conference fiber-optic network, to its limits. The SCinet infrastructure featured a 14.5 gigabit wide-area network connection over multiple OC-48 links to the exhibit floor and connections to most high-speed national research networks.

Our Network Bandwidth Challenge entry, "Visapult: WAN-Deployed Distributed and Parallel Remote Visualization," simulated a grazing collision of two black holes using the Cactus simulation code developed by collaborators at the Albert Einstein Institute in Germany. Data from the simulation, running in real time at both NERSC and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications in Champaign, Illinois, was sent to Denver via ESnet and the Abilene network, where it was volume-rendered in parallel by the Visapult application running on a cluster of PCs in the Berkeley Lab booth on the SC2001 show floor. The application provided highly interactive visualization and computational steering of a production-scale simulation code over a wide-area network, and achieved a sustained network performance level of 3.3 gigabits per second.

Collaborators on the winning team were John Shalf, Wes Bethel, Michael Bennett, John Christman, Eli Dart, Brent Draney, and David Paul of Berkeley Lab; Peter Deiner and Gabrielle Allen of the Albert Einstein Institute/Max-Planck-Institute for Gravitation Physics, Germany; Werner Benger of the Albert Einstein Institute/Konrad Zuse Institute, Berlin, Germany; Jim Ferguson of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications/National Laboratory for Applied Network Research; and Tony Rimovsky of NCSA.

The RAGE robot made its debut at the SC2001 conference, capturing both technical presentations and less formal human interactions in the exhibit hall, and feeding the information into the Access Grid, and thence to the world. With its four-wheel drive and four-wheel steering, RAGE was designed to take the Access Grid beyond the walls of its specially built, inherently immobile nodal facilities.

RAGE is connected to its remote operator by wireless network technology. It is equipped with an on-board PC and video conferencing software, as well as speakers, a microphone, a video camera, and a flat-panel screen. With these capabilities, RAGE can provide Access Grid interaction in many locations not equipped with a node. Once it returns to Berkeley Lab, RAGE is expected to provide remote tours of the Oakland Scientific Facility.

RAGE was designed and built by John Shalf, Zach Radding, Deb Agarwal, Keith Jackson, Marcia Perry, Martin Stoufer, Joshua Boverhof, Dan Gunter, and Clayton Bagwell of the Computing Sciences organization, and Eve Edelson of the Environmental Energy Technologies Division.