11/18/2006 HPCWire"Purdue Researchers Stream Massive Internet"

Researchers at Purdue University's Envision Center for Data
Perceptualization have transmitted what may be the largest movie ever
streamed over the Internet.

The two-minute animated video, which was a scientific visualization of
a cell structure from a bacterium, was streamed at a rate of 7.5
gigabits per second with a peak transfer rate of 8.4 gigabits per
second. At that speed, the researchers could have transmitted
approximately 12 movie DVDs in the same two minutes.

Laura Arns, associate director and research scientist at the Envision
Center, said the speedy transfer demonstrated a cost-effective method
for providing access to scientific visualizations.

"The video was not compressed and it wasn't done using expensive,
highly specialized equipment," she said. "The equipment could have
been purchased off the shelf for less than $100,000."

Arns said the technique could allow researchers to collaborate in real
time on projects such as drug discovery or viewing massive images from
the Hubble telescope. She said there also could be future applications
for the entertainment industry.

"Using this, new release movies could be streamed into theaters all at
the same time," said Arns. "Or, the movie studios could use this
technique to move films that are in production so that people could
work on them collaboratively in real time."

The video measured 4096 pixels by 3072 pixels, which is the equivalent
of 12 17-inch computer monitors arranged in a grid three monitors high
and four monitors wide. The video was displayed on Purdue Envision
Center's large tiled display.

The project was a demonstration at the SC06 conference in Tampa,
Florida, and the data was transmitted over the high-speed National
LambdaRail research network as part of the conference's High
Performance Computing Bandwidth Challenge. The HPC Bandwidth Challenge
is a competition among advanced computing institutions to fully use a
10-gigabit network from the SC06 conference in Tampa back to their
home institution to demonstrate the capabilities of current high-speed
research networks. In the challenge, the two-minute video was played
in a loop so that it ran for 20 minutes.

Purdue's project was done in collaboration with Apple Computer,
Advanced Clustering Technologies Inc., and useours.com. Apple provided
six Xserve Raid storage devices and Advanced Clustering Technologies
provided six rack-mounted server machines.

Dwight McKay, director of systems engineering for Information
Technology at Purdue, says the video could be stopped, replayed and
zoomed in real time.

"It's like a digital video recorder, or DVR, in how it works," he
said. "This cell structure has about 90,000 atoms, and the video zooms
in at some points to show more detail."

McKay said that because the network speed was faster than that of the
disks, the seven-person research team and 11 supporting staff members
simulated the transmission before it was tried.

"This is actually technically tricky to do. You have to have multiple
data readers sending the video into the pipe and multiple readers
receiving information on the other end," McKay said. "We've created a
way to break this animation into segments, one for each tile of the
tiled display, send it across the country and then have it reassemble
on the display as one piece, all in real time."

Arns said that the project provided researchers with insights that
will help in other areas as well.

"The longer we do it, the more cool things we find," she said. "We
learned a lot about how to optimize data to move on the network, and
we've already been applying that to some of our large collaborative
scientific projects at Purdue."

The video and more information about the project are available online
at http://www.envision.purdue.edu/4kstream/video.html.