It’s good to talk around the world
Posted on 23 March 2004
Academics at up to half a dozen sites around the world will be able to talk to each other, hear key speakers, and interact at conferences using innovative conference facilities and broadband technology, thanks to major investment at the University of York.
The Department of Computer Science is installing the latest conferencing technology on the White Rose grid, allowing groups of people who may be many thousands of miles apart to communicate by video using giant, wall-sized screens. Other digital technologies such as video clips and powerpoint presentations can also be used on the grid during conferences and seminars.
A grant of £30,000 made to the project by the EPSRC (Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council) to support this aspect of the grid run by the Universities of York, Leeds and Sheffield, (the White Rose Universities). The White Rose Grid is the first of its kind, a metropolitan grid that will provide a general-purpose high performance computing (HPC) service from researchers of the three universities. Its purpose is to deliver stable well-managed HPC services, and to demonstrate the benefits of grid technologies in sharing resources and supporting multidisciplinary consortium-based research. The White Rose Grid will deliver these benefits to a wide range of researchers in the areas including mathematical and computational modelling in natural sciences; modelling complex engineering systems; bio-informatics and bio-medical sciences; earth and environmental sciences; and computer science and informatics.
The WRG consortium is participating fully in the UK E-Science initiative to advance the state of the art in grid computing.
Professor Jim Austin, project leader, said: “This is a very exciting and innovative way to bring together real-time conferencing facilities with the benefit of broadband technology.”
Members of the University will be able to use the access grid to participate in large-scale meetings and collaborative teamwork sessions from May 2004.
Interested parties should contact Aaron Turner on aaron.turner@cs.york.ac.uk
Notes to editors:
- The White Rose Consortium comprises the Universities of York, Sheffield and Leeds. Together their total income and research capacity exceed that of any other UK university.
- The White Rose Grid (WRG) e-Science Centre of Excellence brings together those researchers from the Yorkshire region who are engaged in e-Science activities and through these in the development of grid technology. It manages a portfolio of collaborative projects within regional universities and their industrial partners. The initiative focuses on building, expanding and exploiting the emerging IT infrastructure, the grid, which employs many components to create a collaborative environment for research computing in the region.
- The grid is a collaborative project between the three White Rose Universities of Leeds, York and Sheffield and their IT partners: Esteem Systems, Sun Microsystems, and Streamline Computing. The Yorkshire and Humber Development Agency, Yorkshire Forward, is enabling the Consortium to expand its activities into the region and engage research universities and companies in e-Science.