News for and about the Internet2 community

[Lauren Rotman <>]

“Enabling Virtual Organizations” Application Wins 2009 Internet2 IDEA Awards

Award Recognizes Influential Advanced Application That Enables Real Time Collaboration; DRAGON and Muse projects receive honorable mentions

ARLINGTON, VA – April 28, 2009 – Today at its annual Spring Member Meeting, Internet2 announced that the “Enabling Virtual Organizations” or EVO application has been awarded the 2009 Internet2 Driving Exemplary Applications (IDEA) Award. The annual Internet2 IDEA award seeks to recognize leading innovators who have created and deployed advanced network applications that have enabled transformational progress in research, teaching and learning.

EVO, developed by researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) is a videoconferencing and desktop sharing system designed to provide a seamless real-time collaboration platform for bridging remotely located collaborators and resources in support of science and research. Originally designed to meet the unique and demanding needs of the High Energy Physics (HEP) community, EVO is today in wide and continual use by thousands of collaborators in many disciplines, as well as by many groups of educators and students worldwide.

“Researchers involved in major global science projects rely on remote access to both collaborators and data on a daily basis throughout all phases of their project, from the original conception and design, to construction and commissioning, to the delivery of results and eventually their scientific discoveries,” said Philippe Galvez, EVO’s chief architect and senior research scientist at Caltech.

Harvey Newman, the Professor of Physics and head of US LHCNet who leads the Caltech team—and a member of Internet2’s Strategic Planning Executive Committee and Architecture and Operations Council—said: “Developing the EVO system was absolutely critical to support the work in the HEP community, and it has since provided a pathway for many other disciplines to rethink how they can leverage remote resources to achieve breakthroughs in their respective fields. We look forward to future developments by the EVO team to meet the rapidly evolving needs of scientific communities worldwide.”

Chosen from many distinguished nominations, the winning submissions were judged on the depth of their positive impact on primary users, their technical merit, and the likelihood that the application would be more broadly adopted.

The EVO architecture emerged from over ten years of development and large-scale operation of collaborative tools, and Caltech’s unique communications fabric for high-performance messaging, pervasive monitoring and autonomous control of global-scale systems called MonALISA (monalisa.caltech.edu).  EVO allows users throughout a worldwide scientific collaboration to integrate standards-based collaboration into all phases of their daily work, whether working on desktops or laptops with any of the major operating systems, in conference rooms using standard videoconferencing equipment, in experimental control rooms or auditoriums.

Through the use of intelligent agents, EVO automatically directs the data streams, optimally interlinks the sites participating in a conference, and moderates the flows and their quality to accommodate a wide range of network conditions. This provides round the clock non-stop system operations supporting many thousands of users, with a minimum of human intervention. On the client side, EVO supports a wide range of audio, video and display devices, including support for HD (1080i) sessions on mass market PC systems with large single or multiple screens at low cost. EVO’s OpenGL-based 3D VIEVO interface has the unique capability of handling a wide variety of real-time high-resolution video, audio and other content in the form of “objects” for state-of-the-art scientific collaborative sessions.

“It is clear that the EVO project has had a significant impact on its primary user base within the high energy physics field and has already shown great potential for supporting many other communities within the research and education space,” said Jack Suess, chair of the IDEA award judging committee, vice president for Information Technology and CIO of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. “We applaud EVO and its developers for this breakthrough work which we believe serves as a model for the entire community.”

The IDEA Award was presented at Internet2's 2009 Spring Member Meeting held in Arlington, Virginia on April 28, 2009. Also to be recognized at the awards ceremony are two honorable mentions:

* The NSF-funded DRAGON (Dynamic Resource Allocation via GMPLS Optical Networks) project, with development collaborators from University of Maryland, Mid-Atlantic Crossroads, University of Southern California (USC) Information Sciences Institute (ISI) East, and George Mason University.  For more information, visit http://dragon.maxgigapop.net/twiki/bin/view/DRAGON/WebHome.
* The Muse project, with development collaborators from MAGPI, MCNC, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Washington. For more information, visithttp://k20.internet2.edu/.

Additional information about the Internet2 IDEA Awards can be found at http://www.internet2.edu/idea/.
For additional information on EVO, visit: http://evo.caltech.edu

About Internet2
Internet2 is the foremost U.S. advanced networking consortium. Led by the research and education community since 1996, Internet2 promotes the missions of its members by providing both leading-edge network capabilities and unique partnership opportunities that together facilitate the development, deployment and use of revolutionary Internet technologies. Internet2 brings the U.S. research and academic community together with technology leaders from industry, government and the international community to undertake collaborative efforts that have a fundamental impact on tomorrow's Internet.  For more information, visit http://www.internet2.edu.


###