Televisualization: Science by Satellite

BOSTON, Siggraph, August 1989 - What do you do when you need a
supercomputer for an interactive visualization application and you have
only a workstation?  There isn't exactly a Cray on every block these
days.  But satellite access may be one solution, as demonstrated last
week by Sun Microsystems at the Siggraph '89 trade show.

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), a unit of
the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, in conjunction with
AT&T and Sun, offered a vision of the future for supercomputer access
that will allow scientists, engineers and others to collaborate even
though they may be thousands of miles apart.

During this first-ever "Televisualization", scientists were able to
control interactive supercomputer simulations and visualization
applications, developed in cooperation with NCSA's RIVERS Project.
AT&T's SKYNET (R) Video Conferencing Service transmited from Illinois
the resulting live animations back to Boston where SunVideo (TM)
displayed the images in a Sun workstation window in full-motion,
24-bit, true-color.

In a second, more in-depth demonstration at Boston's Museum of Science,
scientists using a Sun workstation in Boston interactively controlled
the NCSA's Illinois-based visualization system - running on a Cray-2
supercomputer and an Alliant VFX/80 supercomputer - via satellite and
the use of frame buffers from Ultra Network Technologies.

AT&T's Skynet video satellite service beamed animations back to Boston
for display in a Sun-Video window on the workstation monitor.

"This isn't a product; it's more like a historic moment", said Bob
Ellis, Sun's manager for graphics software projects.  "we're doing
visualization at a distance from the supercomputer, independent of
communications pathways.  Alot of people are interested in distributed
video, ... [and] workstations make this cost-effective".

"Not everybody can afford a supercomputer, but through available
technology, users can have access to them", added Zahra Ardehali, Sun's
market segment manager for visualization.  "And it's very fast - at
multiple gigabytes per second, it's almost like sitting in the same
room with a Cray".

Officials also said they seek to encourage the development of national
high-speed networks to provide users all over the United States with
effective supercomputer access on a routine basis.

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications can be contacted at
152 Computing Applications Building, 605 E. Springfield Ave.,
Champaign, IL 61820, (217) 244-0072