Cross-middleware Interoperability in Distributed Concurrent Engineering

Secure, distributed collaboration between different organizations is a key challenge in Grid computing today. The GDCD project has produced a Grid-based demonstrator Virtual Collaborative Facility (VCF) for the European Space Agency. The purpose of this work is to show the potential of Grid technology to support fully distributed concurrent design, while addressing practical considerations including network security, interoperability, and integration of legacy applications. The VCF allows domain engineers to use the concurrent design methodology in a distributed fashion to perform studies for future space missions. To demonstrate the interoperability and integration capabilities of Grid computing in concurrent design, we developed prototype VCF components based on ESA’s current Excel-based Concurrent Design Facility (a non-distributed environment), using a STEP-compliant database that stores design parameters. The database was exposed as a secure GRIA 5.1 Grid service, whilst a .NET/WSE3.0-based library was developed to enable secure communication between the Excel client and STEP database

EIES 2 : a distributed architecture for supporting group work

The Computerized Conferencing Center (CCCC) at New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) has been researching on-line group communications for 17 years by developing and studying tools to advance the collective intelligence . The Electronic Information Exchange System 2 (EIES2) provides a research, development and operational environment for distributed computer supported cooperative work (CSCW) systems. The EIES 2 distributed Smalltalk processor provides for rapid prototyping and implementation of muti-media CSCW facilities in the network environment. The Smalltalk support of the object model, and meta-language properties make it ideally suited for incremental development CSCW applications. The EIES2 communication environment supports a decentralized network architecture. Modern standards are used in the implementation of data structures, communication interfaces and database. The EIES2 application layer protocols support use ASN.1 data representation to access to an object-oriented distributed database via X.ROS remote operation services. EIES2 can serve as a foundation on which group work systems may be built and defines protocols that can allow them to inter-operate. An initial system presents a powerful metaphor of conferences and activities which provides an extensible framework upon which to add group work applications. Work to date has provided structures for information exchange, inquiry networking, information filtering, the on-line virtual classroom, and group decision support. This paper presents the system architecture model used for EIES2 and describes the implementation and current applications

LVC Interaction within a Mixed Reality Training System

The United States military is increasingly pursuing advanced live, virtual, and constructive (LVC) training systems for reduced cost, greater training flexibility, and decreased training times. Combining the advantages of realistic training environments and virtual worlds, mixed reality LVC training systems can enable live and virtual trainee interaction as if co-located. However, LVC interaction in these systems often requires constructing immersive environments, developing hardware for live-virtual interaction, tracking in occluded environments, and an architecture that supports real-time transfer of entity information across many systems. This paper discusses a system that overcomes these challenges to empower LVC interaction in a reconfigurable, mixed reality environment. This system was developed and tested in an immersive, reconfigurable, and mixed reality LVC training system for the dismounted warfighter at ISU, known as the Veldt, to overcome LVC interaction challenges and as a test bed for cuttingedge technology to meet future U.S. Army battlefield requirements. Trainees interact physically in the Veldt and virtually through commercial and developed game engines. Evaluation involving military trained personnel found this system to be effective, immersive, and useful for developing the critical decision-making skills necessary for the battlefield. Procedural terrain modeling, model-matching database techniques, and a central communication server process all live and virtual entity data from system components to create a cohesive virtual world across all distributed simulators and game engines in real-time. This system achieves rare LVC interaction within multiple physical and virtual immersive environments for training in real-time across many distributed systems

Workload balancing in distributed virtual reality environments

Virtual Reality (VR) has grown to become state-of-theart technology in many business- and consumer oriented E-Commerce applications. One of the major design challenges of VR environments is the placement of the rendering process. The rendering process converts the abstract description of a scene as contained in an object database to an image. This process is usually done at the client side like in VRML [1] a technology that requires the client’s computational power for smooth rendering. The vision of VR is also strongly connected to the issue of Quality of Service (QoS) as the perceived realism is subject to an interactive frame rate ranging from 10 to 30 frames-per-second (fps), real-time feedback mechanisms and realistic image quality. These requirements overwhelm traditional home computers or even high sophisticated graphical workstations over their limits. Our work therefore introduces an approach for a distributed rendering architecture that gracefully balances the workload between the client and a clusterbased server. We believe that a distributed rendering approach as described in this paper has three major benefits: It reduces the clients workload, it decreases the network traffic and it allows to re-use already rendered scenes

Blockchain-Based Healthcare: Three Successful Proof-of-Concept Pilots Worth Considering

This paper features the use of blockchain technology in the healthcare industry, with special focus on healthcare data exchange and interoperability; drug supply chain integrity and remote auditing; and clinical trials and population health research. This study uses the research method of analyzing the published case studies, academic articles, trade articles, and videos on MEDRec, Patientory, and the AmerisourceBergen/Merck alliance with SAP/CryptoWerk. The “blockchain” concept was introduced around October 2008 when a proposal for the virtual currency, bitcoin, was offered. Blockchain is a much broader concept than bitcoin and has the following key attributes: distributed database; peer-to-peer transmission; transparency with pseudonymity; irreversibility of records; and use of computational logic. The following three healthcare use cases have been taken up for proof-of-concept pilots by MEDRec, Patientory, and the AmerisourceBergen/Merck collaboration with SAP/CryptoWerk. While blockchain technology has a promising potential for specific use cases in the healthcare industry, there are major challenges to deal with as well

Prototyping Virtual Data Technologies in ATLAS Data Challenge 1 Production

For efficiency of the large production tasks distributed worldwide, it is essential to provide shared production management tools comprised of integratable and interoperable services. To enhance the ATLAS DC1 production toolkit, we introduced and tested a Virtual Data services component. For each major data transformation step identified in the ATLAS data processing pipeline (event generation, detector simulation, background pile-up and digitization, etc) the Virtual Data Cookbook (VDC) catalogue encapsulates the specific data transformation knowledge and the validated parameters settings that must be provided before the data transformation invocation. To provide for local-remote transparency during DC1 production, the VDC database server delivered in a controlled way both the validated production parameters and the templated production recipes for thousands of the event generation and detector simulation jobs around the world, simplifying the production management solutions.Comment: Talk from the 2003 Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP03), La Jolla, Ca, USA, March 2003, 5 pages, 3 figures, pdf. PSN TUCP01